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Hi, I'm Ted from Everything Attachments and we're here today with our new design of lawn aerator or plugger. This is a core plugger that's going to remove plugs from your yard about 3 to 4 inches, and we've done everything that we can to keep the price down as reasonable as we can, but add a lot of features over any of the pluggers that I have seen, that are on a single drum design. And I am going to go through these one by one with you.
To start with we've put the Quick Hitch on this so you can use the Quick Hitch of the iMatch or Standard Quick Hitch. We've added the Clevis style hitch with a category 1 and 2 step pin. Every piece of this except for the pipe is cut on a laser, so we were able to index things like through this tube and different places I'll show you, to make sure that we end up with the same product every time of the highest quality. And we've added some other new features.
There are four-bolt holes...turn me around, Peanut, to the end here just for a minute. We've added four-bolt holes here in the end. They are already there, so you'll have them if you would like to add the next option which we will show available later. And what that will be is a bar that will go across the whole machine here. I've seen everything piled on these from weights from logs to cinderblocks, to whatever.
The only problem with that is when they get bounced a lot, you know, they end up falling off or something like that or can fall down in between the grates and mess up your spoons. So, it's not that you can't do that, just trying to give you another option, especially for the professional landscaper that’s going to 10 different yards in one day, and it may require 10 different weights to get it right for each yard just because of the type of ground it may be or the moisture content, so it would be really easily adjustable if you had a tractor weight where you could bolt on to this bar.
We'll keep the weights here where it can all ship together at one time to make it as least inexpensive as a way of getting you something that's heavy. Now one of the things we've done, this drum on everybody's aerator, when they make this style of aerator, is commonly filled with water. We've gotten away from that for two reasons.
One, we get several calls every year that, "I forgot to drain my water, and my drum is split because it froze." You may not be in the freeze zone, but if you are, that's one problem you're not going to have to worry about. So, what we've done is we have filled this 9-inch pipe, this is 9-inch schedule 45 and we have filled it with play sand. This is a 72-inch plugger, it held just a little bit over four bags of play sand. And that's over 240 pounds on the inside of this pipe where with the larger diameter that we were using, even with water we've gained like a 150 pounds of what you would have in weight.
And what we were trying to do, when we were rolling the drum, we ended up with about a 12.5-inch circle and that's about what you have to do when you're rolling this on these big machines we have. So, what we wanted to do to accomplish, there's a lot of geometry that goes into this. Our commercial aerator, which is a lot like a Ryan aerator, it's just the way that the spoon is shaped, the way it penetrates the ground and comes back out of the ground without tearing the ground.
So, we wanted to get down to that dimension that seems to work perfectly, which is a 9-inch base. This is 9.25 inches. So we're right at the 9-inch base, with an overall height of the end of the plugs being the exact same as a Lawnaire or a Ryan or an AgriMetal, which are your $3,000 and $4,000, 3-foot commercial pluggers, and when you get into the 6-foot plugger, you get into the $7,000 range. So we want to give you the performance of a $7,000 aerator at a much less, affordable price, but still yet super durable.
So inside of this pipe what we've done here, we've capped the end just like we normally would on the other aerator. In fact, the other aerators were actually built for us at another place near us because we were just so busy, and they have been making them for us for a couple of years. But just, we're trying to get everything consolidated and now we are making absolutely nothing in anyone else's factory. Everything we have brought in-house and we're doing it the way we want, cut on a laser and we're just able to do a lot more things.
So on the inside of this center drum and there are two plug welds here. There's like a 3-inch strip that goes in 6 inches so it's basically a horseshoe that is welded to the end of this plate. And that allows the inch and a quarter axle which is on a four-bolt bearing instead of a two-bolt bearing, it's the heaviest duty bearing on an inch and a quarter axle instead of a 1-inch, which is what we were using. We were simply double-plating that to give it some stability, but now we have a cantilever from the U-shape piece which welds to the end cap before we weld it on.
So we weld one end cap on, stand it up, fill it up with sand, get it completely full. Then we bury this U-shaped axle down into the sand, simply make the well. So everything is perfectly aligned. It's as strong as it can be, in any way by cantilevering that shaft in there about 6 inches, so it's super rigid.
Okay so, we put on the nice stands here like we have on our cultipacker, and this particular one, this is the first one we built so the design will be changed just a little bit. This will be lowered about an inch and a half, right now the tines are just barely clearing the bottom. They're actually touching a little bit, and we want that inch and a half, so if your land's not perfectly level and you're leaving it for the winter, that your tines aren't buried in the mud and rusting and stuff like that. So when you pick this up you simply...this stand will slide down in a notch, you will pick it up and then it will slide back down and lock itself in place. So there's no stand with the clips and all that, that you've got to keep up with. That stays on there permanently, and it will stay up or down, whatever you're needing at the time.
From doing all the reading on lawn aerators and I think Ryan has probably been the king of the aerators till now and what we're trying to do is give you the same performance as a $7,000 machine would give you for much less than half of that. But what we're using is a 6-inch by 6-inch pattern is what you will end up with, these have eight tines on each row, and then each every other row is spaced halfway in between. So every 6 square inches you will have a plug and that's what industry standard says is needed. So, on a 6-foot aerator we've ended up with 88 spoons and spoons aren't cheap to add. These spoons are American-made, they're tempered, that we've had them specially made to really penetrate the ground good. We worked a long time with the company to get the spoons we wanted. It's the same commercial spoon that we're putting on our independent wheel commercial unit. This is just a lot more for your money and on the bigger areas, when you want to do 6 feet, it's simply going to be really fast.
As you can see, we've broken this on the press brake, all the tube, frame everything comes through on an indexed hole, where everything stays perfectly square and straight. Then what we do, just kinda give you an idea of how we place these spoons, we cut out a template or a piece on the laser, like a stencil for a pattern which is a rolled piece of metal with all the holes exactly where they go, we simply slide the sleeve over, take a can of paint and throw a really thin coat on it so we can see exactly where every spot is so we know exactly where to weld.
We weld on the sides only, leaving the top and bottom open so when the rain comes in, it has a place to drain, instead of building up in the cap and causing further rust. We are using an automotive-grade, this is Caterpillar industrial yellow, so if you need any touch-up you can go to just about anywhere from Walmart to the NAPA store or the Caterpillar dealership to get a can of paint.
So we've tried to make everything as user-friendly as we can. Come on back around to the front. And I think for those of you that are going to be doing more than one yard, and just want the ease and accessibility, that this bolt on weight bracket will be a really nice feature to have, especially when we can send the weights with it. So your bolt is already in here for your quick attach, your dimensions are set. You've got an upper hole here also when you're using your top link. And this is pretty much what I wanted to end up with for myself as the best drum-style aerator on the market.
Now, one thing that doesn't help me, we do free shipping on everything. Everybody knows nothing ships for free, so we calculate that in to some degree, and we actually lose a little more than we gain for sure, in the long run. But it's a simple way of buying, you know what you're paying for it. But we are going to be shipping, in this case, instead of sending it without the water, we are going to send it with the sand. So you're going to have 200...I'm going to have 250 pounds more of weight to send to you, no matter what.
It will affect the shipping a little bit, but it sure beats having to mess with the water, keeping it from freezing, you're getting more weight per foot of aerator, no matter what. In a lot of cases you will not need to add any weight to this machine. We've not cut any corners, this is a heavy machine, all the weights will be posted of each size on the internet, on the website of Everything Attachments.
If you've got any questions, give us a call or an email, we'll be happy to size the right aerator for your tractor, and a lot of times we're going to ask you, "What type of soil do you have or what part of the country do you live in?" So we can kind of judge how much weight that you're going to need. Give us a call, we'll be happy to help you at Everything Attachments.
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