Practical road drag (Grader)

[PILOON]

Years back we had to DIY our road maintenance and developed our version of a drag 'grader' that looked like below. .

We'd pull with my old Willis Jeep about 3-4 time per year.
Our version was a bit simpler as we simply had chains attached to the front corners and both ends of the Jeep bumper.
Since we'd often snag something we inserted small trailer tires in the tow chain lines. and that worked just great.
Blades are arranged so that the front blade 'spillover' would be caught by the next one and the last acted like a finish blade.

At one point in time we added a plywood 'deck' and a person would ride it (holding onto a rope) and was able to actually steer it by shifting his weight from side to side.
Only scraps were used, nothing fancy, and that rig served us well for some 12 years until the city took over our road.
Angling the front blades is critical so as to create a slicing action and to move material sideways to fill in the dips.

When the city took over with a huge grader they never did better than we did with our 'DIY DRAG'.

 

[Gary Fowler]

Someone copied your design and is now selling them

 

[California]

I built one nearly identical, after a friend gave me several new snowplow edges that were in an auction batch he won. (Rubber clamped between two pieces of angle iron).

Before welding anything, I tried bolting it up with the existing bolt holes. This works so well that I never bothered to refine the design. A small amount of material gets dumped off the side at times but I've never seen a ridge more than 1.5 inches high so I consider it good enough as-is.

More important, I devised a lifting method. My lane is narrow so I need to lift it for the U-turn at each pass. I added a slack chain across the middle that goes across the tips of the forks, so I can lift it by raising the forks.

This photo was when I first bolted it up. The next step was short chains to the front corners of the rear forks. It's normally used floating but I lower the forks on it for ballast to knock down gopher mounds in the orchard.

Here's the post where I described this photo. Could anyone use the rubber snowplow edges? They're visible under the workbench.

 

[PILOON]

Someone copied your design and is now selling them

Well that's complimentary,
It is in fact not my design as back in the '50's a local rural municipality used a similar drag, only they used horses to pull it.
LOL, and I'm ancient enough to have seen it in action.

 

[kpsp50]

Did a nice job with the price of fuel we may be going back to horses lol

 

[JCMan]

I built one nearly identical, after a friend gave me several new snowplow edges that were in an auction batch he won. (Rubber clamped between two pieces of angle iron).

Before welding anything, I tried bolting it up with the existing bolt holes. This works so well that I never bothered to refine the design. A small amount of material gets dumped off the side at times but I've never seen a ridge more than 1.5 inches high so I consider it good enough as-is.

More important, I devised a lifting method. My lane is narrow so I need to lift it for the U-turn at each pass. I added a slack chain across the middle that goes across the tips of the forks, so I can lift it by raising the forks.

This photo was when I first bolted it up. The next step was short chains to the front corners of the rear forks. It's normally used floating but I lower the forks on it for ballast to knock down gopher mounds in the orchard.

Here's the post where I described this photo. Could anyone use the rubber snowplow edges? They're visible under the workbench.

Your 3 point fork lift looks a little like one I made from channel iron off a couple mobile home hitches my daughter in law gave me. I copied it from a picture from England in an organic farming magazine. Works great.

 

[Millerman]

Well that's complimentary,
It is in fact not my design as back in the '50's a local rural municipality used a similar drag, only they used horses to pull it.
LOL, and I'm ancient enough to have seen it in action.

I just wondered how you transport it to and from or did I miss that somewhere in the posts.