So I have the Landpride RB3784 6-way blade, 7 feet wide, and no rear hydraulics. When researching my buy, naturally the popular concensus on TBN was that you want the top-n-tilt, the more hydraulics for road maintenance tools the better, basically. However I'd reached my limit, and had to rule it out.
There are four things I want to do with my rear blade to manage my long dirt/gravel driveway:
- Maintain drainage ditches
- Maintain crown of the gravel surface
- Scoop material (gravel) toward the center of the driveway from edges
- Generally smooth the surface (remove dips)
My ditch work is ugly, but mostly working. Getting the blade to dig in and move (though not necessarily _remove_) material to the side of the driveway is not a problem, though sometimes changing the position of the heavy blade arm is challenging (since it weighs more than I do).
My problem is more about the blade digging in when I do NOT want it dig. For example, I may have the blade positioned to do a reasonable scoop-from-side activity, but it's completely sensitive to dips/non-level driveway surface. So the blade position that worked when the tractor was level is now digging up my yard when the tractor is not level. It's like I need some kind of "float" for the blade. (For this reason, 95% of all my leveling has been with my bucket on float - and not the blade).
Same for smoothing the surface. If you have even the slightest dip in the surface, then one pair of wheels in the tractor enters the dip, and the blade is either too far up (front tires dipped), or too far down (rear tires dipped), and now you're just digging _new_ dips.
Then there's scooping material. If you offset the blade by swinging the arm to the side, there is some kind of slope bias in that action even if you haven't angled the blade. In fact, I need to angle the blade in the toward the center of the driveway to correct for it. E.g. I use the swing arm to place the blade to the far right of the tractor, and angle the blade horizontally so that the right edge leads to direct gravel toward the center. Those two actions seem to make the blade angle down vertically, enough that sometimes I must correct, or it will ditch when I want it just to scoop materials centerward.
No doubt the above problems are all at least partly because I'm new at this, I can't stress my noobishness enough. But I am getting practice, and the blade just continues to thwart my every goal for it beyond digging ditches. I know a box blade would be better for smoothing, but I'm not sure it would help with scooping and crowning. And I am having ZERO luck getting a crown, because if I get a proper side-to-side angle on the blade so that the mid of the driveway will be higher than the edge of the driveway, then the blade will be digging up my yard on every dip, unlevel wheel footing and so on.
- Is it hopeless to do this stuff without hydraulics to fine tune pitch and such while moving?
- Am I using the wrong tool for the job?
- Is there a "float" for the 3PH like there is for the bucket that I simply don't know about?
I've also played with the angle of the blade with respect to toplink adjustments and aggressiveness of material, i.e. short toplink to "smooth", long toplink to be more aggressive with the bottom of the blade. Even when it's very short it's still pretty aggressive and doesn't function well for smoothing.
I'm mostly smoothing tailgate dropped gravel right now. The truck invariably drops it deeper than I like, and sometimes wider/narrower than I like. So not only do I need to crown it, but I also need to get it from point where it's too thick to point B where it's too thin, and mostly I drag with the bucket on float to do that, since any attempt to use the bucket to scoop it up and move it would make a far larger mess. (Since the tailgate result isn't too bad, just too think where it's deposited).
Maybe the answer is just more practice and "stepwise refinement", i.e. get the driveway level, _then_ crown, etc, but my best approximations at "level" are also easily felt as bumps when driving across it.
Looking for advice on techniques, tooling, etc. I'm starting to think some kind of blade with wheels on it might have been better. Don't really know.
[Addendum, in general, I also spend way more time raking gravel by hand, and clearing debris from ditches by hand, than I would like. I was hoping the tractor was going to help more in this regard. Where I can ditch with the bucket it's great, but ditching with the rear blade leaves all kinds of stuff I have to shovel out, and I have to use the blade where it's too tight to position the tractor perpindicular to the driveway because of trees]
