Best Choice: Box Blade, Grader, Home Built...?

[MaineSpring]

I've been wanting to make or buy something to maintain the driveway and occasionally groom fresh earth such as building sites or new lawns. My assumption was that a drag combined with a box blade was my best bet. Not sure how smooth a job a box blade will do in the hands of an inexperienced operator, so was thinking about building my own rig. That is, until I found this. I like the looks of it, but haven't dared ask how much it cost.

What do you all think? Does anyone here have one of these ABI TR3 rigs or something like it? Is there an open source design I could copy under public license? Wouldn't mind whipping it up in CAD for home fabrication, but lack experience to know what works and what does not. Your thoughts on what is important for such a piece of machinery to work well in multi-purpose environments would be most welcome.

I hope there isn't already a thread (or more) on the subject that I missed, but if so feel free to redirect the conversation. My search efforts did not reveal any relevant discussions.

 

[chim]

Welcome aboard! It does look interesting in the video. Whether it would work like that in real life is questionable. All of the places it is being demonstrated have been previously loosened up with something else - almost as though it had been rototilled. When our driveway consisted of gravel I'm pretty sure that implement would have had a very difficult time making a dent in it.

I bought and sold a box blade when we appropriated an adjacent lot and changed it from a corn field to yard. That was a pretty useful implement for the dirt work. The landscape rake followed the box blade and it worked out well.

Below are 2-1/2 DIY implements. I had the weld shop at work make the top one for our large gravel laydown area behind the shop. The lower two (or 1-1/2?) are two versions of a fabricobbled drag made of a pair of I-beams. The first rendition was to smooth a sand volleyball court I made for the kids. It's on a B7500 in the lower picture. The boom pole mounting worked nicely (but was cumbersome). A chain on each side could be lengthened / shortened to cast material to either side.

The center pic is a modification of the original I-beam drag. The blind flange provides some weight and a pin dropped through the bolt holes allows setting it to an angle.

 

[jimh406]

A grader/scraper is dead easy to use, but also can do significant repairs by using the scarifiers. The biggest between one and box blade is how the material gets put back onto the surface. A grader/scraper automatically dumps material to the left side of the box.

Take a look at some of the demonstrations of grader/scrapers and land planes on YouTube. Grader/scraper is the Land Pride name for land planes.