In the event of a lawsuit resulting from a rollover and ending in death or serious injury to the operator or bystanders, the tractor manufacturer will be the primary defendant. You can expect that the first effort will be to show that the operator was doing something inherently unsafe to cause the rollover.
If it comes down to failure of the ROPS, any, repeat ANY, modification, even clamps, will be inspected carefully, especially of the area of failure is in their immediate vicinity. A good lawyer/engineer combination might try to make a case for the addition/modification causing an unforeseen distribution of forces on the ROPS, which ultimately resulted in failure of the device. Any hole, especially in the vicinity of the point of failure will also be suspect. I can even see someone trying to blame the extra weight of a set of lights mounted high on the ROPS as being a contributing factor to the rollover.
The whole point of the discussion is simple. If you are concerned about winning a lawsuit against the tractor seller/manufacturer/megacorporation that might be somehow tied to the thing, do not do anything to the the ROPS without express written consent from the the manufacturer or his representative. Not the dealer, the manufacturer.
On the other hand, if you are possessed of a little common sense and want to customize your tractor to your needs, go ahead. Just don't expect someone else to pay for damages if the thing fails to perform as expected when the unexpected awful befalls you. As has been much said here, you probably won't hurt the ROPS. It's not like they're made of some exotic alloy or anything. Mine wasn't even a good fit on the tractor, but I feel better with it there.
Along the lines of culpability, has anyone besides me wondered about the strength of the plastic hoods on the JDs if a rollover should stand the thing on its head? Their literature makes a big deal of the "safety zone" from the ROPS to the hood, but will that plastic hood hold up the weight put on it during a rollover?
For the NH line, is the ROPS high enough to keep your neck from being broken if the tractor does a complete roll? That drooping hoodline that improves visibility also lowers the line from the ROPS to the front of the machine.
For me, I think I'd prefer a wider ROPS over a taller one. It seems that would keep the tractor from getting on it's head better while I'm flopping around in the seat belt. The narrow ones would seem to allow it to past a 90 degree roll more readily.
Perhaps we can turn this discussion in that direction, although I'm pretty sure each brand has the data to back up their design.
But why is it that the folding ROPS is often a very different shape and fitment than the non-folding one on the same machine?
