Cheaper, Better, Faster?

I am still trying out my new tractor debris fork.

I was worried that it wouldn’t be strong enough, because the tines are held on by welds at the very rear, where they experience a great deal of force when the tines are pushed up, down, or sideways. When I designed this thing, I considered putting struts between the tines, close to the back, to back up the welds.

Today I shoved the fork under an oak log about 15 feet wide and 18″ thick. I lifted one end off the ground with no trouble, and then I moved that end a few feet without hearing steel snap.

This suggests the tines will handle the heaviest loads I am likely to put on them.

I used the fork to remove a bunch of brush from the yard. Branches were growing this way and that, threatening to block Amazon trucks, and I also cut a magnolia that was growing in the wrong place.

Here’s a photo of the loaded fork.

I just can’t make myself believe an expensive grapple would hold all of that. I would guess there are about 200 pounds of junk on the fork, and that isn’t much, but look how much space it takes up. I’m pretty sure grapples only hold small loads.

Can it be that grapples are useless and overpriced? Sure seems like it.

I gathered, moved, and dumped two loads that size in maybe 20 minutes. It amounts to something like 1000 cubic feet of brush. Very easy. Think a grapple would have turned this job into 4 loads.

A grapple would cost somewhere between $2400 and $4000, before tax and shipping, and it would require additional hydraulics. Figure $5000 to do it right. For that, I would get…what? I could pick up logs. I can do that now. I could move debris. I can do that now, much faster. I could remove stumps, badly and slowly. I can do that with my sub-$200 subsoiler.

I see videos of guys scraping weeds off the surface of the ground with grapples, but a bucket will do that, and I have a bucket. Once the weeds are down, a fork will move them faster than a grapple, and switching from a bucket to a fork takes two minutes.

I think I did good here. I’m glad I didn’t blow thousands on a toy that wouldn’t do what the fork does.

Since building this thing, I learned that I could have bought a manure fork, which is very similar to this, for under $2000. Maybe I would have bought one had I found it sooner.

I’m extremely happy with this tool. I also bought a Kobalt cordless pole saw on sale for $100, battery and charger included, so I am taking branches down like nobody’s business. This pole saw only has an 8″ bar, but it will cut small stuff like butter, and because it’s cordless, it’s immune from socialist ethanol gas woes. When I want to use it, it will work. No carb cleaning.

The battery is only 2Ah, but I used it for about an hour, and it was still working when I put it on the charger. It may be a long time before I use my gas pole saw again.

Hard to think of anything else I really need right now.