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Pickup-Mounted TMR Mixer
I wanted the portability of a feeder wagon coupled with the accuracy of a TMR mixer, but couldn't use any of the portable TMR units I looked at. For one thing, I couldn't justify the expense. For another, most portable units were much bigger than I needed and you still had to hook them up to a tractor, which made them
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Pickup-Mounted TMR Mixer LIVESTOCK Feeding Equipment 19-4-35 I wanted the portability of a feeder wagon coupled with the accuracy of a TMR mixer, but couldn't use any of the portable TMR units I looked at. For one thing, I couldn't justify the expense. For another, most portable units were much bigger than I needed and you still had to hook them up to a tractor, which made them impractical for daily use in our custom Holstein heifer raising operation.
So I bought a new Knight 3170 TMR mixer with 170 cu. ft. capacity for $8,000 and mounted it on the back of a pickup. It was a 1974 Ford F-250 4-WD that had a pto shaft attached to the transmission from when I used it to unload chopper wagons. The TMR mixer lent itself to mounting on the back of the pickup better than I'd ever dreamed. For example, the mixer's driveshaft is right above the pto so the two were easy to hook together. Likewise, the discharge door is right up by the cab so you can easily keep an eye on it while unloading. The only rather tricky part was driving the mixer with pto instead of the electric motor that was intended to drive it. (I purchased the mixer without the electric motor.) We solved that problem by attaching a pulley to the pto shaft and another on the mixer's motor and belt-driving it. We drive the mixer between 400 and 500 rpm's when running the truck's engine at 1,000 to 1,200 rpm's, as indicated by the tachometer in the cab.
Since there was already some reinforcement of the rear frame to accommodate the pto, we didn't have to modify the frame whatsoever to mount the mixer on the pickup with U-bolts. In fact, we didn't even have to weld anything. Overload springs already on the rear truck axle easily handle the unloaded, 3,000-lb. weight of the mixer, plus the 2,000 or so extra lbs. when loaded. The only real fabricating we had to do was to make fenders we can stand on out of steel plate. With a computerized scale mounted inside the truck's cab, we're able to tell exactly how much and what we're feeding, and we're not tying up a tractor while we're doing it. It's worked great for feeding tons of feed since we converted the truck and mixer last year. (Gary Hagen, 1048 30th Ave., Amery, Wis. 54001 ph 715 268-2450).
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