I needed to pull the weeds in my driveway and decided it would be faster to just build a blade to drag them to death with. The main requirement was that I not purchase anything except the pins and a new top link (needed a new one for my snowblower, so I could justify it). Luckily I had a piece of W6 beam that I'd been saving for 15 years, so I cut 4' of that off to make the main blade, and I just turned it sideways so it has two cutting edges sort of a thing. The mount for the toplink is some 2.5ish HSS that was sitting in a pile rusting. The box edges were leftover flat bar from building a fuel trailer for my employer, and the gussets for them were a drop from cutting up some 6x2 HSS for something (who knows). The lower mounts were some other scrap HSS and some strange tabs I had lying around which I think were supposed to be part of a trailer hitch for only god knows what.
Originally I was going to weld a couple mounts on it so I could hang some scrap brake rotors/drums on it for weight, but I forgot before I carried it out of the shop, so like any good project that will never be fixed because rocks worked almost as good and were way less effort at that point.
Honestly it works pretty good. Maybe more weight would be better. I debated painting it, but it's just going to get rubbed off anyway. It did remove about 90% of the weeds with only a few passes, and it took me about 3 hours to build, so I think I'm ahead on that.
To do it over I think I'd use the other beam I had lying around, it had a wider flange, however it's only been aging for a couple years so it's really not ready for project use yet. I probably could have welded a hitch receiver in it too, since that would have been useful, along with mounts for said brake rotor/drum weights. It works well enough I'm sure I'll not bother to make a new one though.
Originally I was going to weld a couple mounts on it so I could hang some scrap brake rotors/drums on it for weight, but I forgot before I carried it out of the shop, so like any good project that will never be fixed because rocks worked almost as good and were way less effort at that point.
Honestly it works pretty good. Maybe more weight would be better. I debated painting it, but it's just going to get rubbed off anyway. It did remove about 90% of the weeds with only a few passes, and it took me about 3 hours to build, so I think I'm ahead on that.
To do it over I think I'd use the other beam I had lying around, it had a wider flange, however it's only been aging for a couple years so it's really not ready for project use yet. I probably could have welded a hitch receiver in it too, since that would have been useful, along with mounts for said brake rotor/drum weights. It works well enough I'm sure I'll not bother to make a new one though.
I might just weld a piece of leftover pipe onto it for that though, once I have the shop cleared out again in a week or so, it would only take a few minutes.
