Dirt Moving Rear Blade technique

[ADin]

I recently bought a used RB1060 to assist in a large dirt moving project. I know the rear blade is not the best tools for the job, but I opted for the blade for winter snow moving needs.

Using the blade on the 2305 without position control is somewhat of a pita, but I'm slowly gaining proficiency. My question is this, I can adjust the drop rate on the rear blade, but is there any means or technique to slow the "up" rate? I would like to pull dirt and then at some point "slowly" raise the rear blade to feather out the load. The JD2305 is fairly sensitive and with only a slight touch of the controls will invariably raise the rear blade more than I want. I can lower RPMs to help a bit, but this is not always practical.

As a side question, does frontier or anyone else make side wings which will attach to their rear blades?

Thanks in advance,

 

[thatguy]

On my 2320 (not sure about the 2305 though) there is a knob under the seat that controls the rate of drop..

good luck

brian

 

[beenthere]

I think doing what you want to do with a rear blade is just going to be that .. a pita.

Along with the quick raise, the movement of the blade when the rear wheels go over a hump or in a hole is frustrating too.

I find that angling the blade and turning it around when moving loose dirt or gravel is the best "leveler" using the blade. Just drop it all the way and drive. Making several passes to smooth out the humps and fill in the dips. Having a blade straight (perp to direction of travel) is not a good way to level an area. IMO

 

[RedDirt]

My trick to make my rear blade a versatile tool was to add gauge wheels wheels. I also fabricated a removable ripper assembly and side plates. The build is documented here

With gauge wheels like mine (extended on an arm, not the wheels that just attach directly to the back of the blade), if you were to add a top/tilt system you could control feathering your load by adjusting the top link length on the fly while the blade was down in the float position.

T&T is on a far off wish list so I rough set the blade height with the gauge wheels and fine tune with the top link manually. When in float position and with a gap between the blade and ground a feathering layer is produced since the gague wheels are ridding on graded ground and a progressively thicker layer of dirt is deposited as you move forward.

The side plates were an easy add-on.

 

[ADin]

beenthere - Ah yes, the bumps. I've also more than once been whacked in the head by my ROP as I'm looking back and the tractor is jarred by running over a rock hard clump of clay.

At this point I'm not actually trying to feather for "grading" purposes, but more so to not have an obstacle field of dirt mounds as I'm continuing to redistribute -- for the reason you mentioned. I also agree pushing backwards seems to work well for final grading.

I should have mentioned that I'm moving pretty bad clay fill dirt which packs and turns to concrete as soon as I run over it. The jury is still out as to whether the rear blade is actually faster for redistributing than the front loader, but the one benefit of the RB is that the action of the RB shaving layers of the clay tends to break up the football sized clods of clay. The only way to break them with the front loader is to spike them with the front loader, lifting the whole front of the tractor to apply maximum down force and wiggling a bit.

RedDirt - Very nice work! Your side walls are exactly what I am needing. Seeing this really makes me want to accelerate a welder purchase. You just need an exotic custom paint job (perhaps a RedDirt logo) to match now.

 

[JDGreenGrass]

Aouple points here.....

1) You say you are whacking your head on the ROPS.....This tells me you are going waaay too fast.!! I can't stress enough how important it is to go SLOW when doing any type of road or driveway work. I'm talking low range slow, slow, slow. I think people think that because they get a powerful tractor they can zip around the workarea and complete the job in 20 minutes flat. Not so. Have you ever seen a large Grader gradeing out a country road.?? How fast is he going.??.....SLOW.!!!

2) You say pushing back works good for final gradeing. True, that's a great technique but, don't push back. Spin the blade around and drive forward. This will cover tracks and it less stress on your 3pt. hitch.

Enjoy your work and your achievements.:thumbsup:

 

[jenkinsph]

With the two tools mentioned I suspect you would have better suscess using the loader to move the dirt and redistribute as needed. Use the loader in reverse to feather and smooth it out.

Use the rearblade to pull dirt back towards the center and clean up edges.


Seat time is the key to most of this.:thumbsup:

 

[newt92]

This has nothing to do with the raise/drop rate, but I sometimes pull the tilt pin out when leveling. This allows the blade to float left to right, following the ground contours and keeps from digging in. I always pull the pin for snow removal.

 

[Egon]

Adding gauge wheels and then angling the rear blade is one way to get things level. Takes time running a windrow around though.

 

[KWentling]

I second (or third?) on the gauge wheel. I added a hydraulic tail wheel to my blade so it is easily adjusted for cut and fill and virtually eliminates the choppy action you get without one. Makes it a MUCH more useful tool.

Kim

 

[sunnyside360]

Another option is to use a York Rake with it angled. It works quite well in smoothing out the landscape while raking stones in a wind row where you can scoop them up with the fel. I recently had excavating done and am almost finished using the York Rake using this technique. These rakes are relatively cheap to buy or you can usually rent them at rental stores.

 

[ADin]

Thanks for all the good suggestions, some of the techniques I will likely put to use once I actually try to start smoothing.

As I mentioned, at this point I am only trying to roughly redistribute dirt from large piles dropped into a gully to taper a 3' height difference from what was once an ancient creek path (in woods). The rear blade, while not the right tool for the job still seems better than the front loader for my current situation as I only have room to practically maneuver the tractor in one dimension (e.g. 12-15' x 80' area). Turning is a pain as I have limited width and there is a bit of slope as I fill in the bank. Additionally, the piles are packed so hard (clay) that I make two linear forward/back passes with the rear blade in the time I break loose half a load into the bucket to move.

I am only pulling with the rear blade at this point (haven't even tried pushing) as it is the only way to bite into the packed clay. I did experiment and found that once distributed and broken loose, it seems to be a trivial effort to smooth either pushing or pulling.

I was being somewhat facetious on the head hitting the ROP comment. This issue is not speed as I'm barely crawling. The issue is that I was dragging loads which unless I take additional time to coarsely feather out (even though I'm just trying to move the dirt at this point - hence this thread) I create what amount to large speed bumps. When you back over them slowly you just get a bumpy ride. If you go them at just the right angle you get a condition where one rear wheel is going up ~6" while the other wheel is coming down the other side of the speed bump. This movement at the base of the tractor translates into fairly large movements on the ROPs. Even this is still manageable until the operator gets lazy with head placement near the ROPs and takes his eye off the ball because of distractions - In my particular case it was a horse fly which decided to torture me throughout my entire second evening on the dirt pile.

At the moment we seem to have thunderstorms here about ever 2-3 days so I'm currently on hold.

I believe I can almost double the amount of dirt I can drag if I just had side wings on the blade, so I'm seriously comptemplating making throwaway side wings out of some old 2x8s and 2x4s I have laying around. I think I see how I could build them in about 10 minutes. If it works out and they don't look too embarassing, I will post some pictures.

I will check into the rake rental as I do have a number of golf ball sized rocks I would like to get up before I layer on my topsoil. I will also be building skid shoes before winter, but I don't think I'll need them for this project.