Homemade Farm Equipment and ModificationsWhen you think of homemade farm equipment, all kinds of weird pictures may come to mind. Ed's projects usually come together because of a need that our small farm equipment doesn't fit. Here's a few ideas and interesting ways he's overcome some challenges at Blackberry Blossom Farm and Campground.
A homemade leverage machine, picks up rocks too heavy to move manually. See below for more explanation of this useful idea, otherwise known as "Ed's Rock Picker". Homemade Farm Equipment at it's best!
The projects described here are my attempts at making something simpler to use and easier on us here at the farm. We don’t have any heavy equipment and for the most part we do fine without it. We load mulch by hand with pitchforks and we spread it using snow shovels. We dig holes with shovels and we move a lot of rocks by hand. I've always enjoyed making and inventing things, now I have a reason to tinker with a purpose, homemade farm equipment! How to move rocks heavier than yourself We do occasionally have work which is just too heavy for us. For instance we have lots of rocks here that we simply can’t pick up. We have some rocks which would require a bulldozer to move. These we just use as the center piece for a planting bed. However rocks weighing around 100 to 300 pounds were always a problem. They are too small to use as a focal point but too big to move by hand. I must tell you though, my wife and I have moved some pretty big rocks with pry bars. We didn’t move them far, maybe 20 feet or so, but we did move them. Last year my wife decided she would like a stacked rock wall outside her studio on the front of our house. I liked the idea of the wall. I was not too crazy about moving a lot of big rocks from all over the farm to the wall site. We'll be posting some photos of this wall soon. Time for homemade farm equipment!
It has 3 legs of 2” steel channel with steel plates as feet. The legs attach to 3 channels welded in the shape of a triangle. On the top and bottom of this triangle, I welded a wheel hub from an old Simplicity garden tractor. A section of axle from the same tractor fits down through these hubs and provides the rotation. On top of the axle I welded a short channel. Through this channel there is another section of axle. Attached to this axle there is another longer channel which swivels up and down . The 2 clamps on the very top hold a long locust pole in the top channel. By moving the pole in the channel I can change the mechanical advantage of the machine. So does it work? In the above picture I am picking up about a 250 pound rock and rotating it over the trailer. This rock and many others went into the wall and I can still walk straight. Works for me!
Grass Catcher Re-vamp "Mountain Style" Life here on the farm may be simple but it sure can be rough on equipment. A case in point is the grass catcher we purchased from Woodlawn Product. As I mentioned on the composting page, this machine picks up a lot of grass, is a top-notch quality piece of equipment, and is just the right size to pull with our garden tractor mower. It didn’t take me long to realize that as good as this machine was at collecting grass, it was not intended for an environment like our farm. Off the showroom floor this Grass Catcher is perfect for regular lawns Looks like a job for Homemade Farm Equipment! The fields we mow are sloped and are rather rough with holes here and there. The first trouble I had was with the wheels. With a full grasscatcher of grass, this thing is very heavy. I ran into a hole and the wheel collapsed. I replace the wheel but it happened again, so I replaced the wheels with a couple of industrial pivoting wheels my father-in-law scrounged from somewhere. This machine attached to the tractor with two pins which kept it from rotating like a trailer. It can’t rotate because of the grass hose from the mower to the machine. Before long, the pins had wallowed out their holes. I was in the process of putting 1-7/8 inch balls on all of my garden tractors so I decided to change the hitch on the grass collector to use a ball also. 
The picture shows what I came up with. I’m sure the designers at Woodland Products would cringe if they ever saw this picture, but this hitch works real well. The hitch over the ball in the center does the actual pulling and the two wheels on the outside keep the machine straight behind the mower but run up and down on the plates on the mower hitch allowing the machine to traverse rough ground. The crank handle is on an old trailer jack I welded to the hitch to pick the front of the machine off of the tractor hitch. The outside guide wheels are welded to long bolts so they can be run in and out and locked in place. Homemade farm equipment, simple, huh? For more homemade Farm Equipment here at Blackberry Blossom For a full view of the Grass Catcher we use, check out Woodland Products below.
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I thought the small trailer I'd built from the satellite dish support (pictures on THAT project coming soon!)would be strong enough to haul the rocks if I could find a way to load them onto the trailer. After thinking about it for awhile and surveying the “stuff” I had laying around the shop, I sketched out the design for a tripod with a mount on top which both swivels up and down and rotates. I call it my “leverage machine”, it's a cool piece of homemade farm equipment.
