Home-Built Leaf Shredder

Home-Built Leaf Shredder FARM HOME Miscellaneous 34-5-17 Mark Jenkins beat the blues of raking leaves and shredding them into a bag with a traditional leaf shredder. He had looked at commercial, pull-type shredder/baggers, but was turned off by the price. Instead, he modified his Murray 20-hp garden tractor with its 52-in. mower. "It's the best garden tractor I've ever owned," he says. "It has a wide cut, plenty of power and is built tough enough to handle the bagger." Jenkins installed an old Snapper bagger discharge elbow on the Murray deck and filled in gaps with sheet metal. He also had an old lightweight, 300-gal. poly tank. "I cut off the top of the tank to make a tub 4 ft. wide, 3 ft. deep and 45 in. tall," explains Jenkins. "I made a simple support for it out of some tubing and attached it to the tractor with two bolts. I then installed caster wheels to either side." He then used a length of heavy-duty 8-in. stovepipe to extend the discharge tube to the tub. He cut a hole in the front of the tube and fashioned a top for the tub out of a piece of tin. "It works like a charm running in low gear," says Jenkins. "With the wide cut, it doesn't take long to vacuum up an area. I usually vacuum up more than two tons of dried leaves and grass clippings every year to use as mulch on my gardens." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Mark Jenkins, 12723 E. Panama Road, Nevada, Mo. 64772 (ph 417 684-3339; kyud8@yahoo.com).

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