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“Cub Cadet” Road Grader
About 16 years ago Phil Murphy of Mansfield, Ohio, was in an accident and suffered a severe spinal injury. He now walks with a cane, but he still puts his mechanical skills to work building machines just for fun. He recently built this miniature 4-WD road grader out of 2 Cub Cadet rear ends. It’s painted Allis Chalmers orange.
    The tandem axle machine rides on six 12-in. tall, 10 1/2-in. wide garden tractor wheels. It’s equipped with a 5-ft. wide blade that can be angled left or right, up and down, or tilted from side to side. Power is supplied by a Kohler 22 hp, 2-cyl. military cast iron engine mounted on back. The engine is coupled to one of the Cub Cadets’ hydrostatic transmissions.
    “It’s modeled after a real Galion road grader and built mostly from scrap materials. I tell people that I already had the engine and decided to build something to put it on,” says Murphy, who notes that he got a lot of help from a local machinist friend.
    “I took photos of a real Galion as a guide and built it as close to the real thing as possible. For example, the front wheels hydraulically lean inward when turning.”        He used 3 by 4-in. steel tubing to build the grader’s frame. The 2 Cub Cadet rear ends are bolted together with a big steel plate that Murphy welded to the frame. A homemade driveshaft runs from the engine up to both rear ends.
    The grader’s front axle uses the rear wheel hubs off a Dodge minivan. “The Dodge hubs had the same bolt pattern as the wheels on the Cub Cadet rear ends,” says Murphy.
    The grader is equipped with 5 hydraulic cylinders. They’re used to raise and lower the blade, to adjust the blade angle, to tilt the blade up or down, to control how far the blade’s teeth dig into the ground, and to lean the front wheels in when turning. “All the cylinders operate off a hydraulic pump on one of the Cub Cadets,” says Murphy.        Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Phil Murphy, 1958 Ashland Rd., Mansfield, Ohio 44905 (ph 419 589-3524).


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2016 - Volume #40, Issue #3