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Video 1:
Hi, I'm Ted from Everything Attachments, we're here today with our new box blade. This is our box blade that has the full floating tailgate, we'll show you the back of it. But we went through some different things. We had a category I, II box blade that was rated up to 100 horsepower and we've never had any problem with the box blade. Everything that I build is, to my knowledge, we've never bent one and everything has been good, and they have been on tractors even a little over 100 horsepower. But the reality is, with 100 horsepower, even if I buy the best shank I can buy...now I was getting shanks, all I could find were shanks made in either China or India. Even your main manufacturers and I could name them, but if you pick who you think are the best top three or four manufacturers, you'll find that they're using a shank that is most likely made in China or India, most likely China, even the better ones, I was really surprised.
So we were using the best India shanks we could buy. I did finally locate a manufacturer in Illinois that makes an American-made shank. The finish is really good, the way they're drawn, the tempering should be a lot more truer. We did get...we've gone through thousands of these things and we did have one box that came from India that broke really easy. So we replaced all those, he took that box back, replaced them, but in the meantime, while I was looking and having a panic attack from these shanks breaking, I was able to locate a manufacturer after a lotta searching in Illinois, [inaudible 00:01:52] Manufacturing, that will make these American shanks. We feel like they're a lot stronger and they're definitely gonna be more consistent, and the number one thing is they're made in America by Americans, and so we're getting some jobs there and we're not having to import them.
But it's still...yeah, even with that size of shank, it's a 10 pound shank, if you've got 15,000 pound plus tractor and you're pulling through the ground and you hit that rock you didn't know was there and you put all that force and it's not necessarily the horsepower, it's the weight, you put all that force on one shank, you're gonna break it. It's not a big deal, it's not a real expensive repair, but we had some complaints that if we rate them for a certain horsepower, that it should be able to take anything. And that's not always the case, you can break anything, you know, with the right abuse. I break my own share of stuff.
So what we did was we derated that box blade a little bit to 80 horsepower, 75 horsepower, just to kinda keep any problems from happen, because the only shank that's available on it is that 10 pound shank, and we're gonna put the best shank we can put in them. But if you're gonna, you know, go through really rocky ground and stuff, the only choice we had and we looked everywhere, and if you look at our biggest box blade, which is called the Beast or the up to 250 horsepower box blade, we custom make our own shanks in-house. Now those shanks weigh over 35 pounds. This shank is weighing 25 pounds. So this is 1-inch thick, 4-inches width, it has 4 1-inch holes in it, it weighs 25 pounds, it's made of T1 steel with an AR400 welded on tip. So that's AR's abrasion resist, it's a very hot [SP] yield strength. And that allows for a long time. If you're in rock quarries, stuff like that, that's the metal that's on their cutting edges and what they welded to their buckets to repair.
If you've got that big tractor, you know you've got a lotta rocks, even if you've got a 75 horsepower tractor, and you know you've got tons of rocks and you're gonna be hard on it and you got a heavy tractor, these shanks are the only thing that are gonna stand those blows like that. And so far, I've never had one bent in the really big box blades up to 250 horsepower. These should do the same in up to 125 horsepower. But this is basically... The front part is very similar to our category I, II box blade. We've made much, much longer ripper shanks holders to hold those big rippers. So you'll see that. So we're gonna offer this blade both ways. This blade's rated for 125 horsepower. If you want the big shanks, that's fine. If you want the little shanks because the box blading is what you mainly do and you're in dirt and you're not worried about breaking your shank, then save $300 and get the standard shank. It's up to you.
It is a category I, II hitch, a quick attach will hook to it. When you get to those bigger tractors, you're probably likely to tear up your quick attach before you tear up the box blades. If you're really gonna get abusive, you probably should hook directly to the box blade. I just wanted you to get an idea of, you know, the thickness of these. Now what we did to start with on our other one, we put tin chains on it. So we put tin on this to start with just like we normally do. And because they're so big, they just were too close, it wasn't gonna let the debris go through, so we took them back off and we lessened the number of shanks with these big shanks, just because you're gonna be doing bigger stuff and we wanted it to be able to get through.
Now we started out kinda with a Woods/Gill SR blade and we put these big shanks in here, there was hardly any room left to the moldboard, it was about right here. So it wasn't gonna leave enough room for the dirt to curl and get back down with these big ripper shanks. So we extended this an extra five inches. Now this is a three-eights thick tube. This one tube here just an 8-foot tube there, cost me over $100.
We index everything with the laser to put our braces in. So these are half-inch side plates, three-eights tubes, three-eights hitch up here with the three-eights bar running to the back, which gives it super rigid up on the top length because when a box blade grabs, what it wants to do is roll the top of the box blade forward, putting more pressure on the top length than there is pulling on the bottom lengths. So that bar is really important there. This is part of the moldboard that comes all the way up, it's got a break across it here for strength and this is a piece of three-eights. It's molded, then it's welded all the way across the top there for just a super amount of strength back here.
Now everybody wanted a locking tailgate. I've also wanted them through the years, nobody's really got one that's perfect. And this one's...the only thing that would make this perfect is if you could do it without having to raise up your tractor and reach under it. There's just no good way. Anything you do on the outside's either gonna get caught by debris or injured, so we didn't go that way. So this is... Right now, we have our six-inch, half-inch thick cutting edges on it. We're also gonna offer it with the same type of edges than the wider ones called the Viper Blade, which is an eight-inch blade. So that really's only needed if you're in a quarry situation where all you do is grade on gravel, granite, stuff like that that's actually gonna wear your edge super fast.
These are as good of American-made bulk edges as you can get. The only one better is there is their Viper Blade, which is bigger. So you can see on the back here we do a lotta things. This is DOM tubing, which is drawn over mandrel tubing, it's not just pipe. It's real expensive, but it's really strong, it's really precision. All the years, like, for 30 years that I sold the Gill products and thought how they made this rear tailgate, I thought this was always rolled here. So this piece of metal here, that's quarter-inch steel, and this goes through three dial processes to actually get this full rolled, then we put a one-inch hardened shaft through here. It makes it super strong.
Now we double bent this one just because it was a test piece. So what you've got is one bend and then down on the tailgate. But it's way stronger than anybody else's way of attaching a tailgate that I know of. It's what I thought Gill was doing. But then actually we bought a brand new gill from somebody to kinda look at it and see what features it had. And after I had already bought a $10,000 die [SP] to do that, we found out that all they did was bend a 90 on it and weld a short piece of 1-inch steel on 4 different places.
So you've ended up with a lot better piece here. It ought to be a lifetime piece. We index all of our gussets into the tailgate here. You've got all these braces back here, that's what's gonna take the force in reverse. To be able to lock it, we've put three different sets of clevises. Well, eight foot has four, six foot has three. This is almost a 1,500 pound box blade.
So you'll put a lynch pin in each of these four places. It's a three-quarter-inch top link pin. Now that'll come with lynch pins on it. Likely debris and stuff like that has a good possibility of knocking off your lynch pins. If you're gonna leave it solid, you should...we're gonna also send bolts with lock nuts. You should probably put those in it and just keep the lynch pins for later. But you can lock it solid or you can leave it in the floating position. We've made you a quality piece, should have no problem up to 125 horsepower. Those shanks should stand it without any problem. We've done... You know, we've made it bigger. This thing's got a huge amount of volume. You can see the braces that come all the way through the moldboard there, welded on both sides with an angle on them.
This just gonna be an awesome box blade if you've got a big tractor. And it kinda splits the difference between what we had, the category I, II box blade up to 100 that we derated to 75 and the one that's just huge, up to 250 horsepower. So, you know, we're filling our line of box blades from one end to the other all the way from the small compacts to the 250 horsepower. We've got several different options that are coming out, the category I, II box blade we just finished it, it also has a tailgate that will float, if you like. Give us a call or an email, we'll help size the right blade for you. Make sure you get the right teeth [SP] for what you're doing and anything else you need. We're here to help you, just give us a call or an email.
I'm Ted from Everything Attachments. I just want to try to give everybody when they're trying to make the purchase for their box blade, when they're trying to figure out exactly what they need for their purposes and of course our salesmen will be happy to help you. I just want kind of give you an explanation of why you would want a locked or a fixed tailgate or a floating tailgate.
Ninety-nine percent of the time for myself, I want a fixed tailgate. So on this one you'll be able to either fix it, meaning lock it in place, or let it float. Okay? The main difference is, if you're doing leveling of any kind, you're doing a driveway, you're doing your final grade, anything that you want to make level, you will do a...unless you...you have to be a really good operator and it's not impossible, but if your tailgate floats only and you can't lock it, if you're a really good operator, you got a lot of years of experience...I can operate one pretty good. But it's still easier for a lot of jobs to just simply do with it locked than it is floating and then I'll explain what is absolutely better with a floating tailgate.
Okay, so for leveling grade, fixed is usually the best, because what you're doing is, you're lowering the front of your box blade to the front of the edges only cutting a little bit. And you're really riding on this back edge kind of as a gauge. The front edge can't go any deeper because the back edge is touching. So it's kind of like your wheel or your gauge wheel is just a blade dragging the ground. It's keeping your blade from just sinking. Okay?
Now if I'm in a grading application...this is for a 125 horsepower tractor here. If I've got that kind of horsepower, especially with a four wheel drive, and I've got a couple of acres or something, it could be more, whatever, but I need to get a lot of dirt from here moved to there. In other words, leveling is not my biggest priority here. It's just simply getting this big hill or whatever moved to somewhere else. Okay? So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to shorten my top link. I'm going to let my rippers dig in really deep. This front edge, when it gets down, it's going to let this back tailgate float up. So when this is down in the ground and we welded an extra side blade here for wear, you're going to have this down in the ground maybe an inch or so.
So you're going to be taking off about three or four inches. Now it takes a lot of horsepower to do that, but if you've got it, you can...this tailgate will float up and will allow that front edge to dig as much as your tractor will take. So you're going to have to use your position lever to keep it from just digging more. Even 125 horsepower tractor at a certain point, you don't want to take 10 inches off at a time. You want to take three or four inches, something that's reasonable, something that you can get rolling in here. And then when it's full, you can either barely drag it on the ground or whatever you want to do to get it to where you're taking it, okay? So if you're really moving massive amounts of dirt, a floating tailgate is absolutely what you want.
If you're doing leveling...now this one can be fixed or float, so you can do either. That's the good thing. Most blades are either/or. So in most cases, if it's an either/or situation, you probably want a fixed. If you're a major grader then you're going to want the floating. In this case, luckily you can put the pins in and fix it just like a welded rear tailgate. This blade also has...it has a lot of room in here so when you're backing up, it allows you to build up a lot of dirt pushed back. I'll give you an instance why a floating tailgate can be terrible. When I was younger, from the time I was twelve years old, I scraped...I'm downtown right here in Newton, North Carolina, but I scraped all the banks and all the different businesses around here from the time I was young till I got old enough to drive and had better things to do.
But if you...with a floating tailgate, I did most of my pushing from the back because you can't...it's a box. So you want to just keep...what you want to do in a parking lot is make one big strip through it and then back everything up to the parking places. But if you get snow between these two edges, this edge starts getting up here. So then you have to pull this edge up and keep taking the snow out of it and it's a real pain. So if you've got it locked, it isn't going to do that and you can lock that on this one. So I learned real quick that a floating tailgate and snow don't go together at all because if you're back dragging, it just packs up. So that's no good.
So because a floating tailgate is more expensive, a lot of people think they want it and a lot of them are right. And as long as you can lock it, it isn't going to matter. You're going to get a great box blade either way. A lot of the tailgates that you see floating, if you go to a Gannon or some of the bigger blades, they're going to be like this. You're going to have a lot of distance between the bottom of the cutting edge and where it's actually pivoting. If you go to a cheap box blade that says floating tailgate and basically what you see is a cutting edge with a couple piano hinges welded across of it and it's no taller than that, that's not going to be a very well performing tailgate. And if you really hit something hard from behind, you're going to bend it and tear it up. If you're going to buy a floating tailgate, get one that's worth buying is my recommendation.
So we'll put them in the field soon. It's January right now. It's really cold. We're trying to get into the ground some. We're behind on our videos. We're trying to get called up. And we'll lock this blade and show you how to grade. We'll unlock the blade and show you how to really dig out some dirt. Wish we could do it today. But with our new line of box blades coming out, I just wanted to do a little explaining of why you want one or the other. The little blades right now will only come fixed. As they get bigger, they'll have the floating part available. Give us a call or an email. You can kind of explain what work you're doing, how much experience you've got, and we can try to help you make your best choice. Thanks for making all your purchases at Everything Attachments.
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8' BOX GRADER 
