During the last yr I've been busy, rebuilding, not restoring walk-behinds. I'm involved now days with making up cultivating machine for Market Gardeners and Truck crop farmers. I also am designing new cult units to work with these vintage rebuilt/repowered tractors. No one currently builds anything like the old school Planet Jr's or Simplicity units, its just mostly tillers today. Heres some pictures of what I been up to, for the future of Horticulture.
The future of tractors
- Thread starter Lauber1
- Start date
Hey Jeff, it's great to see you here. That's really nice work building attachments for the old tractors.
lol, ya im getting world famous, whether I want to be or not. Practical Farmers of Iowa come here June/17 and spent 3 hrs filming me and about half the tractors & other toys. There is a 5 section Utube video on me out there someplace. I also have made up some of my own vid's, under just my name.
why all of them so far. It kind of complex having to know which attachment to use at what time and soil condition, and weed height.
yes im playing with DB all the time also, just didn't post a picture,lol. They work better for the man who has a long row to hoe, due to the weight and bulk of the tractor, ie 300+ lbs vs 140 lbs. Many tractors are going to FarmHers, who cant muscle around a bigger unit, but can dance away on a simp or pj. Here's pic's of a model 120 DB, pulling a southern cult unit, to which ive installed a 48" wire weeder. I don't have any photos of cult units for them right now.
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I usually plow with one of them once a yr, but mostly they just sit in the sheds, as I been back on my walk-behinds for a while now.
Good looking machines.
Well if understand you right, they pivot on a single pin, the rear of the axil shaft. Db uses an under slung hitch. The hitching, just mirrors what ever chassis im using, i.e., if the tractor used a sleeve type hitch, a ring or a pipe, a few used a flat iron with a hole drilled in the end. Most times a tractor came with a great hitching system, just a sucky cult unit, a bad delivery to the ground, poor tooling, lousy gauge wheels in the wrong place, and made you struggle to control it. Always remember that the tractor needs to be in control of the direction the cult is going, you steer it, the cult unit follows. Don't ever think you can make a cult unit go sideways with some kind of handle. I can put tooling from almost any companies cults on my frame, and make it a better working unit. I have one I use here that has a Planet jr main frame, but all the tooling is David Bradley. Some thing just work better together, then they ever did on their separate machines. Hope this answered your question.
You do have some great cultivator set-ups ! . I should have worded it " does the cultivator frame articulate ?" I used my walkbehinds more this year and I can see less weeding for the most part , I'm still at the "collecting stage " of my sweeps , shanks ect. I like the fact that I can keep all the original stuff , bolt on something else and not having to clobber up a nice tractor
Heres my daily user PJ tractor, and a pic of a brand new cult being fabb'd up in the shop, notice its big orginal equipment PJ weed hoes, and the fact that this A-1 Planet frame work is set up to use either a PJ or Simp hitch. Nice part of Simp hitches, is that it lets you use Waterbury, Simplicity, Midland, Wards, and probably other tractors as your power unit, with the same hitching system. I also have one that works on a 12BB Bolens tractor. I can put a better cultivation unit behind any old school walker, that you can operate standing between the rows and using one hand to guide the machine.
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Those are some nice set-ups you have ! I notice you use different gauge wheels , would you mind telling your experience using different ones ? I've only every used the DB with those steel wheels that are at most 3/8 " wide and the Walsh which has about a 2" wide wheels .