Modified front blade

[Lil Foot]

I got this Curtis 60" blade with my tractor, and the previous owner said he had bought it from another B7100 owner, and that it was mounted on the tractor at the time of purchase. He never mounted it on his (now mine) tractor. Imagine my surprise when I tried to mount it and found it did not fit. The mounting tabs for the loader arms & curl rams were spaced about 1 1/4" too wide for my loader. The original B7100 must have had a different loader.
I machined the welds off, re-positioned the mounting tabs, & re-welded them.
I also had to sleeve the upper pin holes, as all four were 3/4", and my loader uses 5/8" pins in the upper holes. While it was apart, I painted everything with some paints left over from other projects.
I plan on using it to distribute & spread fill & driveway cinders in an upcoming project to raise my driveway about 2 feet & install a 16"x22"x25' culvert.
Only problem is that it's almost too pretty to use.

 

[kc8fbl]

Great job! It does look really nice and I know what you mean about looking too pretty to dirty it up.

 

[Lil Foot]

Thanks! I'm kinda dreading using it for cinders- that stuff will make short work of that pretty paint. Oh well, that's what it's for!

 

[skeets]

Good golly that front looks like the old Myers snow plow I had on my Jeep back in 74,,lol,, It looks like ya done another fine job there

 

[North Idaho Wolfman]

I have a similar model blade, just have to get the loader changed over to SSQA before I can use it.

 

[cerlawson]

I'd like to know how it works for final finish grading.

With a bucket, I find I need to do back blading to level things up, because I have difficulty keeping the bucket at a constant elevation with the tractor more or less galloping some going forward. Also, comment on "digging in" due to cutting edge curvature. Your experiences will help me decide.

Thus, my question also is about back blading with it.

 

[Lil Foot]

I have little experience with it, maybe an hour of experimentation before painting. It back drags very well, making it easy to get a good, level surface.
On a hard packed surface, the "mushroom feet" do a good job of keeping it from digging in, but on soft surfaces, (loose gravel, cinders) they just dive in, letting the blade get deeper & deeper. You can compensate by constantly bumping the blade up, but it requires a lot of attention. I have thought about replacing the "mushroom feet" with some sort of caster arrangement, but I'm not sure there is room with the blade angled to either side. I will have a better feel for it later this summer after my driveway project.

 

[Lil Foot]

I'd like to know how it works for final finish grading.

cerlawson-
Here's a couple of pics while scraping the cinders from the area of the driveway I'm going to raise a couple feet. (I'm removing the cinders so i can re-use them on the new grade surface.)
As you can see, the surface is even & level, with virtually no effort. I just set the mushrooms even with the bottom of the blade, set it down & started pushing. The surface is pretty hard packed, so trying to do this on a soft surface might be more difficult, but it worked great in this instance.