3-Pt. "No Freeze" Fabric Roller

3-Pt. "No Freeze" Fabric Roller MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Miscellaneous 27-3-39 John Dansby, Rocky Mount, Virginia, says covering his large fruit and vegetable plots to protect them from frost used to be a real hassle, but he solved the problem with a tractor-mounted roller. "I use a strong spun polyester-type synthetic material to cover my strawberries. It protects them from freezing at temperatures as cold as 20 degrees Fahrenheit, but lets air and water pass through. "The material is 50 ft. wide, folded to a width of about 10 ft. and rolled up on a cardboard spool. Unrolling it and spreading it out was difficult. Rolling it back up after you'd used it was even worse," he says. So Dansby sketched what he wanted and took it to a local fabricating shop where they produced it for him. The roller/unroller mounts on his tractor 3-pt. hitch. "It's a steel frame that's about 12 ft. wide and extends back behind the rear wheels. It looks sort of like a big toilet paper holder," he explains. Dansby's frame has a 2-in. cradle on both ends. A hand winch operated from the tractor seat allows him to disconnect the top link on the unroller and lower the back end of it to the ground. To load a spool of material onto it, he releases the top link and lowers the unroller. He inserts a 13-ft. length of 3-in. steel pipe through the cardboard tube and sets the ends in the cradles. He then winches the frame back up and re-attaches the top link. Rolling the fabric back up is easy, too. "It has a hand crank welded to one end of the steel pipe. The cardboard tubes aren't very sturdy, so we don't reuse them. Instead, we put a 10-ft. length of 3-in. inside dia. PVC pipe over the steel pipe and pin it in place on the roller with a bolt inserted through both the PVC and steel pipes. I fasten the end of the material to the PVC pipe in three or four places with duct tape. Then we just wind it up," he says. Once the fabric is re-rolled, he covers it with black plastic, fastened on with duct tape and stores it. "It doesn't make as neat a roll as when it was new, but it gets it off the field and in a roll so we can store it and use it again," Dansby says. He says if the material is wet, he can fasten it to the unroller and pull it off the field to a grassy area to dry before rolling it up again. "I thought about using a hydraulic cylinder in place of the hand winch, and I may still put a hydraulic motor on the crank to make it easier to pick up the plastic," he says. "But it works great as it is and saves us a lot of time." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, John Dansby, 4481 Colonial Turnpike, Rocky Mount, Va. 24151 (ph 540 576-3658).

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