Extended Information:
Video 1
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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