Bale Handling Truck Loads, Hauls, And Stacks

Bale Handling Truck Loads, Hauls, And Stacks BALE HANDLING Bale Handling (31B) 27-3-28 Richard Weber's home-built bale-hauling truck can pick up and load 10 big round bales nearly as fast as he can drive through the field. Weber and his brother Dennis designed the unique truck in the late 1980s. Weber had a part-time bale-hauling business, using a 1-ton dually pickup, a 38-ft. gooseneck trailer, and a tractor at both ends to load and unload the bales. He decided he could save a lot of time and haul more bales if he had a machine that would load, haul, and unload the bales. He explained what he wanted to his brother, an engineer, and the two of them decided what materials were needed to build such a machine. It's built around a 1972 Chevrolet C-50 cab-over truck and chassis. Up front is a bale fork that can be moved side-to-side by a hydraulic motor. To pick up and load a bale, two hydraulic motors raise the fork up a rack-and-pinion type curved track mounted on each side of the cab. At the top of the cab, the bale fork releases the bale onto a table that sits behind the cab. When Weber has loaded two bales side-by-side onto this table, the table lowers hydraulically and sets the pair of bales onto a chain apron on the truck bed. Hydraulic motors move the tracks back 5 ft. while Weber drives to the next bale. Weber's truck will handle 10 bales at a time. He can fill it up in about 10 minutes if the bales aren't spaced too far apart on the field. The bed tilts to unload the bales. Weber says they slide off so that they are lined up snugly end-to-end. Weber says one of the toughest parts of building the truck was making the tracks for the fork. His brother Dennis made the arc from rectangular steel tubing by cutting small sections, bending them together, and welding them in place. Then he cut a 4-in. wide strip out of the inside of each tube and installed the rack inside. Weber says they worked at the track in their spare time, so it took about a year to get it all together. Once they took it to the field, a few bugs showed up that had to be fixed before everything would work correctly. The truck allowed him to build up his part-time business into a full time job and now has more than 130 customers. Weber figures he spent around $25,000 on materials to make the bale loader and flatbed. That doesn't include the truck itself. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Richard Weber, Weber Bale Moving, 28107 N Road, Fowler, Kansas 67844 (ph 620 646-5401, email: sweber@swko.net); or Dennis Weber, San Marcos, Calif. (ph 760 471-6168, cell ph 760 809-4543, email: DWeber4026@aol.com).

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