He Built His Own Cable-Laying Plow

He Built His Own Cable-Laying Plow MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Earth Movers 29-5-19 "I've always enjoyed the work shop side of farming as much as anything else. It's so much more fun to build something if I can scrounge it up out of the scrap pile," says Marshall Litchfield, Macomb, Ill., a long-time contributor to FARM SHOW. His latest invention is a 3-pt. mounted plow he made out of salvaged machine parts for laying electrical cable. It lets him lay cable from 1 to 1 1/2 ft. deep in one pass, with no mess and without having to do any backfilling. The cable-laying plow rides on the 3-pt. hitch and two wheels off an old Deere grain drill. The major component is a 1-in. wide shank off an old C-ripper plow. The shank bolts to a 6-in. channel iron frame that T's off a short length of 7-in. box tubing. A pair of uprights, made from smaller channel iron, supports the cable spool. He used 1/8-in. thick steel plate to make a boot that bolts onto the C-shank. A small wheel is fitted to the bottom of the boot, between it and the C-shank. Cable leads down over the wheel, which feeds the cable along the bottom of the ditch as the machine rolls along. "It works great," says Litchfield. "I use my Ford 960 50 hp tractor to pull it. One time I used it to lay 800 ft. of electrical cable when I put in some pole yard lights. I didn't want to use a trencher because it throws dirt out to the side, which makes a mess. Also, after the wire is in you have to backfill the trench. My machine does it all in one pass." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Marshall Litchfield, 15495 N 700th Rd., Macomb, Ill. 61455 (ph 309 254-3481).

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