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He Put A Big Loader On A Little Tractor
Laray Vanderpool didn't like having to watch his wife push a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He figured there had to be a better way so he built a loader to fit their Deere garden tractor. Now she has a 3-ft. wide bucket to move dirt and other material.
"Abut the only things I had to buy new were some hydraulic hoses," says Vanderpool. "I had a 1967 Deere 110 garden tractor that I had rebuilt. A neighbor was junking out a plow, and I got two cylinders from it and a third with control valves from an old combine. The hydraulic pump is from a log splitter."
Vanderpool took advantage of the design of the 110. While patterning his loader after full-size units, he modified the design slightly. His loader slips into the slot at the front of the tractor where snowblowers and blades were meant to be mounted. At the tractor's midpoint, he mounted upright posts for the loader arms in the holes to mount a belly mower.
"I can pull two pins and back right out of the loader when I want to use the tractor for something else," he says. "I can lift the bucket about 4 ft. high and could raise it another foot by repositioning the cylinders."
The uprights are cut from 3/16-in., 2 by 2-in. steel tubing, while the loader arms are fabricated from thin wall 2 by 3-in. steel tubing with reinforcing plate over pressure points. The bucket is plate steel, but the frame pieces that run forward to the front of the tractor are only 3/4-in. by 1 1/2-in.
"I tried to use the lightest stuff I could to keep the weight down," says Vanderpool. "As it is, the tractor and loader weigh 500 lbs."
To dress up his "loader" tractor, Vanderpool added duals on back. For the proper dual affect, he rolled a piece of steel and stuck it between each pair to space them out.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Laray Vanderpool, 1250 Southern Rd., Montgomery, Mich. 49255 (ph 517 296-4540).


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2009 - Volume #33, Issue #1