Spreading sand

wildwillie · Dec 28, 2012

I picked up a 3pt spreader to put sand on the ice but the first time I used it the pattern was way to wide. I only want it about 10' not 40'. So I tried adding a shield with some improvement. Now I'm thinking about removing the vertical flingers form the rotating disc. Has anyone done this?

sdkubota · Dec 28, 2012

Is there any way you can slow the rotation speed? That would be the best way to reduce the spread diameter.

wildwillie · Dec 28, 2012

Yes but with a hydrostatic that means you slow to a crawl.

sdkubota · Dec 28, 2012

wildwillie said:
Yes but with a hydrostatic that means you slow to a crawl.

I was hoping maybe it had a chain drive setup to easily change the rotational speed. So it is a direct hydraulic motor that runs the spreader? Might be able to get a different hydraulic motor that runs at a different rpm setting?

wildwillie · Dec 28, 2012

No I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear, the tractor is a L3400 hydrostatic the spreader is driven off the PTO.

leonz · Dec 28, 2012

wildwillie said:
I picked up a 3pt spreader to put sand on the ice but the first time I used it the pattern was way to wide. I only want it about 10' not 40'. So I tried adding a shield with some improvement. Now I'm thinking about removing the vertical flingers form the rotating disc. Has anyone done this?

If your spreader does not have a flow regulator which limits the amount of volume exiting the spreader and dropping on the spinner removing a paddle will give not give you a huge improvement as far as coverage goes.
If you remove all the vanes on the spinner disc the spreader will not work or will work very poorly requiring more passes.

Have you added any windshield washer fluid to the sand to make it flow more effectively?

I would rather see you operate at a half throttle speed as once you remove the paddles/vanes you are worse off.

5picker · Dec 28, 2012

Put a flow restrictor in one of the hydraulic lines. It will slow the rotational speed. A restrictor can be as simple as welding one of the fittings shut and drilling a small hole or you could get an adjustable one like this from Prince.

Tomtint · Dec 28, 2012

My fathers BX has a 3 point PTO spreader he uses for salt. Sand/salt does not always work so well. If it is wet it really does not work so well. Straight salt, improvised deflectors and low rpm and drive slow. That's the best solution. It sounds like you are looking to spread the width of your drive way and that is what he does and how he does it.

aczlan · Dec 28, 2012

What problem are you trying to eliminate? If you want to put less down, I would keep the deflectors and reduce the amount dropping onto the disc if needed.
You could convert it to hydraulic drive and control the speed that way, but that would probably run $500ish.

Aaron Z

wildwillie · Dec 29, 2012

First off thanks for the response.
My road is gravel and over a mile with some steep spots. when it needs sand I can easily put down 1/2 a pickup truck load so I want to do it as quickly as possible.I keep sand on site[no salt on gravel road] the spreader I have is the standard cone shaped type with the inner agitator.I think it holds around 300lb. It has a manually operated shoot so I can regulate how fast to dump sand. It really works well but as I said even at slow speed it throughs sand to wide so I wast to much sand. I think if a shield of some type was added it would only through to the rear and not to the sides. Thanks all