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Garden Tractor Spray Rig
Matt Reesor needed a small sprayer for his family’s produce farm. Rather than buy an expensive model from a dealer, he built one himself. Reesor emailed us recently, writing “I’ve been a big fan of FARM SHOW for 20 years and always wanted to make something you could write about. Finally I think I’ve got something that’s FARM SHOW worthy.”
Reesor put the sprayer together over the past year. “First I bought a well-used but still running Craftsman YT3000 lawn tractor for 100 bucks at an auction. It was a steal. The tractor had a 21 hp. Briggs & Stratton twin cylinder engine.”
To provide 10 in. of ground clearance for spraying, Reesor moved the tractor’s original 8-in. rear wheels to the front and installed larger 16-in. high by 12-in. wide wheels on the back. Those are attached to a main frame extension that he made using 2 by 3-in. angle iron. He set the wheels at 36 in. on center to straddle his row crops. Reesor made the floating axle connecting the wheels from 1-in. bar stock and installed pillow-block bearings. The wheels are driven with #40 chain connecting the original mower drive axle to the new one at a 1:1 ratio.
“Extending the frame gave me a longer wheelbase for more stability and added room for the tank and sprayer to mount on a platform that I built between the wheels,” Reesor says. The sprayer consists of a 30-gal. tank, a 3.3 gal. pump, and foldout booms that expand to 25 ft. Reesor says the rig works great for fertilizing his 2-acre fresh market vegetable operation.
“The whole setup took about 30 hrs. to build and cost just under $1,000, which is way less than what I would’ve paid for something to mount on a 4-wheeler,” Reesor says.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Matt Reesor, Fresh Veggies at 60 Aileen, Newmarket, Ontario, Canada (60aileen@gmail.com).


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2020 - Volume #44, Issue #1