No-Till Caddy Built From Old Disks

No-Till Caddy Built From Old Disks TILLAGE EUIPMENT Disks (18) 32-3-16 Thomas Field, Port Dover, Ontario, saved time and money by building a no-till caddy from two old disks and an Alpine liquid fertilizer kit. He pulls an International Harvester 5300 12-ft. drill behind it. The no-till caddy is equipped with a row of wavy coulters on 7-in. spacings and a pair of 55-gal. liquid fertilizer tanks. A ground-driven hydraulic pump, mounted on the drill, is used to deliver liquid fertilizer to the seed openers. "I use it to plant winter wheat after soybean harvest. I planted 300 acres with this home-built caddy last fall with no problems," says Field. "In the past, I made separate passes with a disk and field cultivator before using the drill. Or, I hired someone with a no-till drill at a cost of about $20 per acre. At 300 acres that's $6,000. My no-till caddy lets me plant in one pass and works as good as new commercial no-till models, which sell for $12,000 or more. I spent only about $2,000 to build it. My son Joe helped me." When the caddy is in the working position, the tongue is 18 in. off the ground, which is the same height as the tractor drawbar. He started with an old 12-ft. wide White offset disk equipped with wavy coulters on 7-in. spacings and a Case disk, which he used for parts. The offset disk was originally equipped with four gangs of straight coulters. He cut off the back part of the disk, keeping the two gangs on front and the rocker shaft on back that raises and lowers the machine. Then he welded an angle iron frame on back. The front gangs were straightened out to make one continuous gang running the width of the machine. He replaced all the disk bearings and also replaced the original straight coulters with wavy ones. He made a series of mounting brackets on front for adding tractor weights, allowing the machine to put more down pressure on the coulters. Then he made mounting brackets for a pair of 300-gal. liquid fertilizer tanks. The caddy has a self-leveling tongue on back that always keeps the back of the caddy even with the tongue on the drill. It consists of a 3-in. sq. metal tube inside a 4-in. sq. tube. As the machine is hydraulically raised for road transport, the rocker shaft shoves the 3-in. tube down through the 4-in. tube which shoves the tongue down to keep the drill level with the caddy. "If I want I can use a turnbuckle on back of the caddy to adjust the height of the self-leveling tongue," says Field. He mounted a hydraulic pump on the drill and ran hoses from it to the tanks and back to the drill. He used an old liquid fertilizer kit "I plan to use the caddy without fertilizer this spring when I plant soybeans in order to loosen up the tractor's tire tracks," says Field. "I paid $1,000 for the pump. I already had the Alpine fertilizer kit. It was mounted on an old International Harvester 5100 drill that I'd gotten rid of years ago, but I never used the kit. I paid $30 apiece for the wavy coulters. I used spacers off the Case disk to keep the coulters in a straight line." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Thomas Field, Rt. 2, 753 Lynn Valley Rd., Port Dover, Ontario, Canada N0A 1N2 (ph 519 428-9949).

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