Tractor-Mounted Side Boom Great For Spraying Fence Rows SPRAYING Accessories 26-6-43 Keeping miles of fence rows weed-free was a major chore for cow-calf producer Dan Godwin, Athens, Texas. "We have a lot of electric fencing, and we have to keep the weeds down under them," he explains. "We'd been walking along the fences carrying a hand sprayer to apply herbicides to keep the weeds down." He tried to eliminate the walking by pulling a small spray tank behind his 2150 Deere utility tractor and using a spray wand from the driver's seat. "That didn't work very well, though," he says. "It was difficult to spray and steer, too." He decided the job would be easier if one person drove the tractor and another did the spraying so Godwin set out to build a seat for the spray operator. "I wanted something that would let the person operating the sprayer be as close to the fence as possible, so I made a boom that attaches to the front of the tractor," he says. "It has a seat at the end and is long enough so the tractor driver can position the sprayer over the fence without getting too close to it with the tractor." Godwin says his boom is "àas simple as dirt, but it works great." He made it out of two equal lengths (88 in.) of 1 1/2-in. thin-walled square steel tubing. They're spaced 18 in. apart with cross pieces welded between them at an angle. To mount the boom to the tractor, he welded two 6-in. long pieces of 2-in. square tubing onto the front of his tractor, spaced so the two legs of the boom could slip into them. To give the boom more stability, he ran a round steel brace from the end of the boom to the frame of the tractor. He mounted a steel seat off a Ford tractor at the end of the boom, with a platform made from expanded steel mesh. Hooks along the pipe brace hold the rubber hose to the spray wand. He figures it took him about 4 1/2 hours from start to finish to make the boom. "The only materials I used were left over from other projects, so it didn't really cost anything except my time," he says. He says it takes only about 3 minutes to fit the boom into place on the tractor and secure it. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Dan B. Godwin, 2176 FM 2752, Athens, Texas 75752 (ph 903 675-1039; fax 903 675-2427).

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