Powered "Tire Picker" Also Lays Them Down

Powered "Tire Picker" Also Lays Them Down TIRES/WHEELS Miscellaneous 30-3-19 "I built it for a farmer in Missouri who wanted to pick up tires on the ground, but it also works great to lay down tires and pick them up again," says Dunnville, Ontario, dairy farmer Oscar Vander Heide. Three years ago Vander Heide came up with a tractor-mounted tire handler (Vol. 27, No. 4) that consisted of a three-pronged fork that held 40 to 46 tires at once. After that story was published, Vander Heide got a call from a Missouri cow-calf producer who asked if he could build a new kind of tire handler that would retrieve tires. The fellow said he places tires on the ground under big round bales. The weight of the bales would cause the tires to sink into the ground. As a result, he had to pull the tires out one at a time. Vander Heide's "tire picker" automatically sucks the tires out of the ground and loads them into a metal basket. The tire picker measures 8 ft. sq. and is 3 ft. high at the back, with sloping sides. A 2-ft. section on front angles upward to keep tires from catching on the beater and kicking back. It also serves as a skid plate. There's an 8-ft. rotating shaft on the leading edge of the unit that's powered by a hydraulic motor. The shaft has 4 1/2-in. long steel spikes welded onto it on 6-in. spacings. To load tires, you set the unit flat on the ground, rotating the shaft, then drive forward. The rotating shaft grabs the tires and kicks them inside the basket. To unload the tires you reverse the shaft, then tip the tire picker downward so the tires slide toward the shaft. "Once you get 10 to 15 tires in the bucket, you tip the bucket back so they fall to the back. Then you can load another 10 to 15 tires," says Vander Heide. "I geared the hydraulic motor down in order to keep the beater from throwing the tires in too fast," he notes. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Oscar Vander Heide, Rt. 9, Dunnville, Ontario, Canada N1A 2W8 (ph 905 774-4970).

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