Heavy-Duty Leaf Blower

Heavy-Duty Leaf Blower MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Miscellaneous 34-5-17 "I recently cleared some trees to make new pasture. I wanted to use a blower to clean off leftover debris but didn't want to spend a lot of money. So I converted a silage blower. It'll blow leaves and small branches up to 60 ft.," says Don Young, Clinton, Conn. "I go back and forth, clearing leaves and small branches in swaths up to 60 ft. wide at a time," says Young. He built the unit with help from friends, Jim and Harry Chum of Chum Engineering. "We had to experiment a lot to get everything to work right," he says. He used a 15-year-old New Holland silage blower. He cut off the tongue and wheels and the blower's conveyor/auger, and also installed a 3-pt. hitch hookup. The blower was equipped with a moveable band on the blower housing which he rotated downward 90 degrees to one side. He rebuilt the blower frame to accommodate the low spout position. He removed 3 of the blower's 7 blades to reduce the weight and get more speed. The blower originally had a hole on the back at the bottom for silage intake. He unbolted the back side of the blower and rotated it to move the hole to the top. Then he closed up the hole by covering it with a section of sheet metal. He wasn't getting enough air into the blower, so he used a hole saw to cut a series of 2-in. dia. holes into the blower's front and back sides. He also replaced the blower's original spout with a bigger 9-in. dia. outlet. "It turned out to be a bigger project than I expected, but it really does the job," says Young. "We even used a big pvc pipe to make a wind tunnel so we could try to figure the optimum angle and direction of the spout. "I use a Deere 4110 20 hp tractor to power it. I go pretty slowly, about 1 mph. It'll easily blow leaves as well as pine needles and small branches. I do have to be careful when blowing acorns, which fly around like buckshot. I also use the rig during winter to blow snow off our driveway. It works really good as long as the snow isn't real heavy or more than 5 in. deep." Moving the blower closer to the tractor changed the angle of the blower's pto shaft, so Young had to replace the blower's original pto-driven pulley with a bigger one. He also had to install a 1-way ratchet slip clutch so the tractor's electric pto would come to a slow stop without slipping the belt and burning it up. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Don Young, 25 Ninety Rod Rd., Clinton, Conn. 06413 (ph 860 662-1946; duckman4548@yahoo.com)

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