Home-Built Bucket Fits Deere Garden Tractor

Home-Built Bucket Fits Deere Garden Tractor TRACTORS Accessories 27-4-19 When Bob Abbott moved into a new "suburban" house, he found he was spending a lot of time with a shovel and wheelbarrow, moving piles of landscaping materials from his driveway to areas around the yard. All of his neighbors had similar problems. Figuring there had to be a better way, he went looking for a front-end loader or scoop to mount on his Deere X475 lawn tractor. "While I am sure the ones I found are great products, they all seemed too narrow or didn't lift high enough, and they looked like they were built on the light side," he says. They were also too big to store in his garage. Disappointed, he decided to put his welding skills to use and make a simple scoop that would fit the quick-attach mountings meant for a push blade or snow blower on front of his tractor. He designed the scoop so it was big enough and heavy enough to carry just about anything he could get onto it, and still compact enough to store in the limited amount of space he had in his garage. He located enough scrap steel to complete the project, starting with some 1/4-in. walled, 2-in. sq. tubing to make a frame. He got it free, but it was welded to some 2 by 5-in. rectangular tubing. "I had to cut it apart. The weld had left the square tubing with a 3/8-in. warp, so I had to heat it with my oxy-acetylene torch and bend it straight again before I could use it," he says. Then he paid $5 for a 52 by 48-in. sheet of 1/8-in. plate steel to make the bottom and sides of the scoop. He says the most difficult part of designing the scoop was locating the pivot point and dump mounts. He used a drawing program on his computer to place the pivot points and measure the travel. The lift cylinder in the Deere X475 front quick hitch lifts the scoop. Abbott mounted a 2-in. hydraulic cylinder with an 8-in. stroke on one side of the scoop to dump it. "If it should be necessary, I can add another identical cylinder on the other side, but so far, it seems to work fine with one cylinder," he says. The scoop lifts to a height of about 16 in. and then dumps. And it works from a second spool valve, so he can use his mower deck with the scoop still in place. Abbott figures he spent less than $250 to build the scoop, including some green and yellow paint to make it match his tractor. He says not only is it very useful, but he had a lot of fun making it. He's had requests for similar scoops from friends and neighbors and says he could put weld-it-yourself kits together for others if there's enough interest. He's not sure what the price would be, since he'd be using new materials for the kits. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Bob Abbott, 2363 Chisholm Court, Holt, Mich. 48842 (ph 517 699-4643; email: robert.abbott@jnli.com or boba @abbottgraphics.com).

To read the rest of this story, download this issue below or click here to register with your account number.