"Big Box" Grill Guard For Deere 4230 Tractor

"Big Box" Grill Guard For Deere 4230 Tractor TRACTORS Accessories 30-1-3 "I should've done this 30 years ago," says Daniel Wilde, Burlington, Texas, about the "big box" grill guard he made for his 1972 Deere 4230 tractor. It keeps trash from building up on the grill when he chops corn stalks or grain sorghum stalks each fall. "It solved a common problem with this tractor," says Wilde. "It looks a little odd but it works so well I didn't have to clean my grill even once last fall. It's easy to install and remove, and I didn't make any modifications to the tractor or grill at all." Both sides of the tractor have an 18 by 24-in. grill opening. When chopping dry stalks, the tractor's front axle would stir up trash and leaves which then got sucked up into the grill. "I had to frequently get off the tractor to remove the trash. Sometimes I could only make one pass through the field before the grill was choked up again," he says. To solve the problem, he used 1-in. angle iron and thin sheet metal to build a pair of 24 by 28-in. boxes that are open on the back side and on top. He mounted one box on each side of the tractor, with part of the box extending an inch or two into the engine compartment. Then he removed both grills and mounted them horizontally inside each box at the top. The original dowel pins at each end of the grill fit into holes drilled into the box's angle iron frame. A pair of 1/8-in. thick metal bands extend across the tractor's hood and connect the two boxes together. There's a hole at both ends of each band, and a metal pin that sticks up out of a metal bracket on the box goes through it. Cotter keys are used to secure the pins. Wilde can remove both boxes by simply pulling two cotter keys from each band. "To install the boxes, I prop a stick up under a box on one side of the tractor, then I do the same thing on the other side. Then I slip the metal bands across the tractor hood and secure the pins. The boxes are made from thin sheet metal so they don't weigh much. One person can easily lift them into place. It takes only about 15 minutes to install or remove both boxes," says Wilde. "The key to this design is that air gets sucked in from the top of the tractor, away from the disturbance of the tractor's front axle and wheels and away from the vacuum created by the fan. Any rain that falls into the boxes soon drains away, as the bottom of each box is only loosely screwed on. "Deere's 30 series tractors all came equipped with this type of grill design. It didn't change until 1994, when the company came out with its 8000 series tractors and mounted the grill on front with a small extension on each side," he notes. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Daniel Wilde, 951 FM 964, Burlington, Texas 76519 (ph 254 985-2258; lmwilde@earthlink.net).

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