What Size Scraper

[buffumjr]

I maintain my own dirt road.

I have a Kubota L175 tractor. It weighs 1880 lbs and is 17 hp diesel. So far, I'm pulling a 5' home built box blade, but there's things I'd like to do, like moving dirt from one side of the road to the other, that the box blade does only clumsily.

What length scraper would you recommend? On Craigslist, there are a lot of 6', but that seems a bit large. Do you think my Kubota could handle a 6 footer?

I could weld one up, but this is August! $100 for the surplus steel, and two days of 6 hours a day in 100 degree heat, plus another $20 in hardware. Paying $325 for used looks GOOD.

 

[mikester]

If you are simply maintaining the road a 6 footer would work if you keep the bites small and you have a decent A gravel base. If you have bigger stuff that blade will be a boat anchor.

 

[shootem604]

With the general rule of thumb being 5hp per foot of implement width, anything over 4 feet wide may be harder for your tractor to handle.

 

[buffumjr]

Yeah,I kind of thought so.

How about if I bought a 6' and cut 6" off each end?

 

[GreensvilleJay]

buy a cheap 6 footer...try it out. THEN if it's too much, cut 6" off each side....

 

[ipz2222]

What jay said. I just bought a 7 ft for my bx and I know it's too long but it has left right tilt and pitch. A plasma cutter will make it a 6 ft.

 

[chim]

Our driveway is only about 100 yards long. A section of it is on a fairly good slope, and before it was paved some of the gravel needed to be dragged back up the slope periodically. There was also some general reshaping / re-crowning from time to time. The rear blade didn't work very well. Maybe I wasn't skilled enough or maybe that was the nature of the blade. It alternately bounced or gouged too easily.

That prompted building the drag in the pics below. It's made from scrap and based on the idea that multiple edges working together will tend to flatten the material. The first rendition was for use with my Boom Pole. The BP was only used to lift the rig so I could turn around without dragging a bunch of material where it didn't belong. The lengths of the two chains for pulling could be adjusted so they were unequal in length to cast the scraped-up material straight, right or left. They could also be attached at different heights on the beam to adjust how aggressive it would be. A bit cumbersome, but it worked well.

Years later I modified it to eliminate the need for the boom pole. There was a heavy flange rusting away behind the shop at work that just looked like it belonged on the rig. It rarely gets used since we blacktopped. It's much more user friendly. Easy to rotate and the 3PH controls the amount of cutting or depositing of material.

 

[Tim Horton]

We bought an old 6' rear blade that was 9/10 wore out. Gave it some care and it is still 9/10 wore out, but has served a number of years and will be useful many years to come. It was really cheap..

Reading this kind of thread before my thought has been if I ever got a chance to buy a really cheap 7 or 8' rear blade, I would.

Then cut a foot off the left end only as it is on the tractor so the right end hangs out to use to pull gravel back to the crown area of the road.

My 5 cents of opinion.