Pads Help Handle Silage Bales CROP STORAGE Round Bale Silage 28-3-16 John Smaha, Terrace, British Columbia, came up with a pair of pads to handle silage bales without puncturing the plastic. He says the idea would work on any grapple fork. He'd already modified an old set of logging tongs (used before grapples to load logs) to use on his fork truck to handle big round bales. "We cut the sharp tips off the tongs and extended them out so they'd fit around an 8 by 8 sized round bale," he says. "I figured we could handle the plastic-wrapped bales if we could make pads to fit over the tongs," he says. With help from a local fabrication shop and friend Jerry Haugland, Smaha cut lengths of channel iron to fit over the tongs and then bolted lengths of 2 by 6-in. boards to the back of them. Over the top of the boards, he stretched pieces of old inner tubes and glued them in place. Smaha uses pins through channel iron pads to hold them in place on the tongs. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, RR 3 Stn. Main, C 3 S3, Terrace, B.C., Canada V8G 4R6 (ph 250 635-4243; email: jssmaha@telus.net).

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