High Horsepower Grader/Clearing Box Blade

Video 1:
Hi, I'm Ted from Everything Attachments. We're today with our largest box blade that we've built today, we're calling it our land clearing and grading blade because that's pretty much what it's gonna be used for.

This particular blade is an 8 foot blade, 96 inches and it's going to Louisiana to build a pond out there with a 135 horsepower tractor. Somewhere about 95 horsepower is probably about the minimum size tractor that you're gonna use with this size of blade. We are making it in a little bit narrower width. We're gonna start with a 78, a 90, a 96, which is what this is, 8 feet, a 108 and a 120, which is 10 feet.

So, we're getting ready to do a video with this one with a 105 horsepower that Harry Gant has. It's a T09E, but I've turned up the horsepower, it's got a 105 on the VTO, four wheel drive with a loader. Should make a good video, it'll handle this weight with no problem, but this is almost 2300 lbs in an 8 foot blade. People wanted a heavier blade, so we went all the way, and then we're gonna work our way back towards the regular size blades with a moldboard and stuff that will float. On a clearing blade, where you're just wanting to be able to push massive amounts of dirt, trees and everything around, you really can't put a floating tailgate on it because it just isn't strong enough to take a 200 horsepower tractor. This comes in only a category two and a category three hitch, they will work with the quick hitches. If you get a category three quick hitch, you're gonna need to make sure that you get the wide version, the 38 inch wide version because that's what this is set on.

The moldboards are 30 inches high, as you can see it comes up pretty far here. And the reason we made them 30 inches is because we can cut on either five foot wide sheets of steel or six foot. If we only have a five in stock at the time, then we can still get two without any waste and it works out well for us.

These are three-eighths in thickness, each one of these moldboards on an 8 foot blade weighs 300 lbs. So it takes three men to put this into the press brake and get these bins done. Both moldboards are identical, everything is indexed through it. The main brace here, which is about nine inches, about four inches which makes an L, comes all the way through the moldboard, wraps around the front six-by-six three-eighths thick tube, and then makes it for your pin connection.

Now that's the strongest way of doing it. The way we put it together, we put this through both moldboards, tack it, and then we slide the six inch tube through the hole in the side to get everything to line up, so we can get everything ready to build. And this is a half inch side. Some people say, "Why don't you put a one inch on a box blade this big?" Well, it just doesn't need to be for strength, because we have put a half inch, moon shaped gusset in here. You've got gusseting coming back here, half inch thick, which is actually for wearing. And you've got a six inch here of cantilever, which gives it some strength, you've got all these center braces. Now, as we go wider than eight feet you will see another brace come from the front to the back. But you've also got about four, five inches back here, where the moldboards come apart, for their shape and that gives you some cantilever here. So, we don't think it needs any more side thickness because it has plenty of strength and anything past the weight that we're at now, at almost 2300 lbs, it's just gonna be dead weight.

So, we're trying to build it as strong as we can, and I would say as light as we can, but that's not where we've ended up at 2300 lbs. We've cut slots through the middle of the moldboard here, we've inserted a piece, they're welded on both sides, it connects the moldboard in the middle, to make it really rigid, where it's not trying to move around. We will eventually make some moldboards that are floating, but on a box blade that's meant for 200 horsepower, you just can't use a floating moldboard because it's too weak. You're gonna bend it and when you go to shearing off trees and so forth, it's just too much for them.

Now, the cutting edges that are on this, we order it special from Valk Cutting Edges, it's a US made company, it's what goes on all of our box blades, regardless of which one you buy, we use a US made blade. But these are called a Viper blade. They're five-eighths thick and they're eight inches tall. What we normally use is either three-eighths or half inch thick, six inches tall. And what we use is a heat treated, a case hardened heat treated blade, which is what industry standard is and according to Valk, there's no other company that's making a box blade that's using the Viper blades, which are normally used on road construction, mining equipment and in quarries and stuff, which are fully heat treated, they're hardened all the way through. They're guaranteed not to break. They're twice as expensive as a normal cutting edge, and even more than an imported edge. So, they're a great edge, and they should be able to shear things off, take all the abuse, no problem.

Turning around to the back of this, and I hope you can see everything okay, because we didn't really want to move it, it's just so heavy, you can see these big eight inch thick blades, or eight inch tall blades, five-eighths thick, grade eight bolts through them. You can see where we put part of... It's longer than this on the other side, but we put part of the main brace, coming back through, welded on both sides, you can see the inserts here, where they come through the moldboard and just make everything more rigid. You know, being 30 inches high, so you've got a ton of clearing area here. You've also got a big, large pocket here to start helping you build up the dirt that you're pushing backwards and then, this blade, being three-eighths thick, it shouldn't be able, you know, no matter what you push on, wood or something like that, trees, it should be able to take the load and this is the exact same shape as what the front is, so you're able to do it in both directions with good grading.

We're using a one inch thick shank, we'd looked to try to buy ripper shanks from different companies, no one offered what we wanted, so we're simply burning these out of a plate of one inch with a high yield strength. And then we're welding on, they're not just replaceable, because you shouldn't have to do it much. The tips are welded on but it's an AR material, which is abrasion resistant, 400, so it has a yield strength of over 400,000 lbs, and then it has abrasion resistance in it, which is a lot of carbon.

So, you've got a really strong ripper shank and it's, if I said four inches, I meant to say it's five inches from front to back, one inch thick, they're weighing about 33 lbs apiece with the tip on them. And so, it just keeps adding up into more and more weight. Since the back of this is 30 inches, it makes the front of the hitch actually look small on this. But it's set in the right position, so when you're able to hold yards of dirt and be dragging it from wherever you are, save for the guy in Louisiana that's building a pond, this particular eight foot box blade would probably hold about, and I haven't done the exact cubic feet, but it's probably a little over three yards of dirt. It's what he's gonna be able to carry out at a time. So he's gonna have to be able to pick it up quite a bit to get it over the load, so we've set the hitch in the right position so even a large tractor will be able to pick it up really high. It is category two and category three, quick attach acceptable, this is the proper dimensions. If you're using a category three quick attach you need to make sure you get the large one, that's 38 inches wide.

Now, these ripper shanks are being held in by a category one toppling pin and they have a standard lynch pin like goes on the end of your draw board now, to hold them in. If you're in a lot of brush and stuff, you know you've lost lynch pins before. You might, would wanna, once you've found the magic spot of where you wanna be ripping, you might would wanna replace that with a three-eighths bolt with a lock nut, or a lock washer in a nut. And if you'll notice, this end shank is tilted to the side for two reasons. One, we've got a brace in here to give all of this some stability, but also we wanted to get this tip as close to the edge here, so we can do some serious digging and loosen this ground up to let this go deep, so you can get as much out as possible at a time. It's a lot of trouble. Every piece in this side piece is different than any of the others, and every piece is different, left and right, it's a lot of work to make. But we wanted to get this ripper shank over here to the side, and that's why it's leaning like that.

And we wanted you to... We could have done it maybe, but you wouldn't have been able to get in there and change it easily, with your hands. So, we just went to the extra trouble to do that. It's got a three-eighths thick brace, it goes all the way to the back, all of the piece, this front piece here, which gets to be about eight inches thick in the back with a four inch bend, it goes all the way through both moldboards and it's welded on the front side and the back side, we'll get you some pictures of that. The main brace in here for your back brace, is indexed right here, it's welded in front, back, side, even in the plugs, here.

This box blade should be able to stand a 220 horsepower two wheel drive without any problem, a 180 four wheel drive. We're gonna try it out on a 240 horsepower, four wheel drive tractor, that's dual wheels weighing 25,000 lbs. We'll probably build a ten-footer for that, because that's what it's gonna take to get close to the rear wheels. But we don't see any reason why, with this kind of weight, and the materials we're using, that this won't work just fine.

So, at Everything Attachments we're gonna be adding to our box blade line continually. We've kind of left a huge gap from where we stopped to this, because there's a whole lot in between and we're trying to fill the gap right now with some folding tailgates, a little bit heavier than what we've got and some different options. But this blade is just a monster of a blade and at the weight it is, for what it's for, for big four wheel drive tractors and clearing and grading, something that'll hold yards of dirt and get it out of the way, we're really proud to have one of the biggest box blades in the industry.

And where a lot of these are sold, I think are in the Midwest and down East, but, and I'm not sure about how big the market is, but I guess we'll figure it out.

Give us a call or an email at Everything Attachments and we'll be happy to help you.

Video 2:

Hi, I'm Ted from Everything Attachments, and we're here today with our biggest box blade that we make. Most of us around here call it "The Beast." This is only an 8-foot wide blade, and we've changed the cutting edges out on this from a half-inch by 6-inch blade, which is made by Valk. That's a really good blade and that's available on here. We've put the Viper blade on it, it's also made by Valk. It's a through-hardened cutting edge. It's what's usually used in rock quarries and stuff like that, so they can just take the continual wear of abrasive material. But we've put them on there today just to see what all we could tear up.

This also has the big shanks on it. They're one inch thick. They're five inches in width. And right now we've got them in their medium setting, and we've got about...they're touching in the middle and we've got about that much. We should be able to rip about five inches where it is. And so we just bush-hogged over this area right here to get it down to where we could see what we're doing, and we're gonna try to rip it up and get some solid ground work and there will be some good red clay under there to where we can show you how to cut a ditch and do some stuff.

This is actually a small tractor for this box blade. This box blade's rated up to 250 horsepower with a 2-wheel drive, 220 with a 4-wheel drive. But we have turned up this 90 horsepower tractor to 107 on the PTO. Probably where we're gonna be missing more than anything is gonna be traction with these worn tires. So we're gonna try to just rip up some dirt. Get it loosened up a little bit. Level it if it's unleveled, then cut some ditches, and just see what all it will do.

This box blade's over 2500 pounds with the small cutting edges, and these will probably weigh an extra 100 pounds. So we're right at 2700 pounds here with the box blade. So to some degree that's almost like putting an anchor behind this size of tractor. It really needs a bigger tractor, but we'll see how it does.

I know it's the first time we've ever used one of these. [inaudible 02:34] bringing load on it. All right, so now I'm gonna go for, let's see, four-wheel drive. Getting rid of this grass and all these roots, believe it or not, are going to be the toughest thing out here. I didn't have the blade fully down. So we're probably gonna go back. We're gonna set the rippers deeper. I see it dragging up a little grass. Change gears on [inaudible 03:15]. We're gonna just get to the end of this road, get the rippers back down, and then we'll try this again. It's all a process of learning. Let's see a different gear. Four-wheel drive with the diff lock on. And it's simply gonna take a couple of passes through here. I'm gonna go up another gear to get this grass off the top. Now I'm gonna go ahead and rip one backwards just to get some more grass. Because this grass and these weeds and the roots of grass that's been here for 50 years, really tough. There are some small trees here, too. Gotta get through this hardpan and this red clay. All this root [inaudible 04:57]. Now it's starting to pull a little more horsepower.

I'm pulling in second range third gear right now with this extra horsepower. We're just not down under it far enough to pull enough. Now we're getting some horsepower to pull it out of it. See, the further it pulls, like when we get up to right here, it's not doing as good because it still has grass wadded up under the rippers which will keep it from working altogether. We've got to get through this grass to be able to get to the ground, and this is probably the last pass it's gonna take. Yeah, now it's got the cutting edges down in the ground a little bit. I might have to drop down a gear soon. Let's get this final [inaudible 10:47]. One thing is for sure, if I build it, I'm not scared to tear it up. Let's see if it [inaudible 11:42]. She's pulling now.

So we want to start trying to make this a little wider and we can get to working there again. We're down already about six or seven, maybe eight inches in some places to get even where we're close to busting through this crust on this land that's never been...this land, I'm 50, and this land has never been touched since I've been around because I used to come by this road every day when I was little. If it doesn't seem like it's doing much, consider we're putting about 110 horsepower down into the ground. So that's how much it's still doing even though it's not looking like a lot. And if you wonder why I'm driving today instead of Peanut, it's because this was air-conditioned.

A lot of big stumps that were up under us. We're pulling the roots through. If we tried this with a standard ripper shank instead of these ones we make ourselves, we'd just be breaking them off like shark's teeth. Wow. We hit something pretty hard there. All right, we've stalled her out in third. We've gone to second and we're digging good. So we've might got all the grass off of it, but it's starting to get down into the red clay. We're gonna pull our ripper shanks up, tilt our blade back, and start using some of the back blade and less ripper. Okay, so we've raised the shanks up two notches and we may need to tilt the blade back some. Let's see.

Now we've adjusted the top link totally different. We've gotten off the rippers a little bit and back into the back edges. Now we can start moving this loose dirt into some of these holes, like right here. I'm gonna pick up a little bit and leave a little bit. I'm gonna leave a little bit in this hole right here. I'll go over this low spot and wait until I get right here to this high spot. I'm gonna save this big pile of dirt right here and go back in that hole right there. I'm gonna push some of this dirt backwards and get it in that hole back there. All you need is more horsepower to push more dirt backwards.

Thanks for watching our big land clearing box blade. This was not the perfect conditions or the perfect place to use it. It also should have had a little bit larger tractor to get the full potential out of a 2500-pound box blade. These come from 8 feet to 10 feet and require up to 220 horsepower of a 4-wheel drive tractor to get the full potential. I hope you get the general idea. We appreciate all your purchases at Everything Attachments, and we'll be here to help you size the right box blade for your tractor and your application.