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Winch Drags Yard Debris Off Trailer
Peter Stack always has a lot of yard waste to clean at his home in South Kingstown, R.I. While he had a trailer to take the debris to a local transfer station, it wasn’t easy to unload.
The trailer bed is 5 ft. high by 10 ft. long. “I pack thorny brambles onto the trailer as tightly as I can to minimize trips,” he says.
That means it’s difficult to unload the trailer when he arrives at the transfer site. The more packed in the brambles got, the easier they caught on the sides and the trailer’s wooden floor. He had to pull them out by hand, which took a long time.
After a couple of ideas to make it easier didn’t work, he got creative with ropes, pulleys, and block-and-tackles he had in his shop.
“I also had a crank winch from an old boat trailer,” he says. “I put the winch in place at the tongue end of the trailer. That was pulling towards me, so I had to reverse the pull.
“I put a heavy-duty pulley at the back end of the trailer,” Stack says. “The rope went down to the pulley at that end and came back toward me.”
Stack added a couple of pieces of steel that were essentially in the shape of a “backward-leaning L.” That L sat at the end of the trailer floor closest to the crank.
“That rope came back from the far pulley through a pvc tube so it wouldn’t catch on the brush,” he says. “The rope from the boat winch was still exposed. I was delighted with how well this worked.”
He said everything moved to the end of the trailer and pushed out to the ground as he wanted. Plus, it didn’t take long to put his idea together.
Just before the rope came up into the boat winch, he added another pulley to guide that rope from the floor of the trailer up to the winch. This kept it from pulling the conduit off the floor of the bed.
The rope pulls an L-shaped metal bracket to the back of the trailer. As he loads the trailer, he packs the brush around the upright bracket.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Peter Stack, Village of West Kingston, South Kingstown, R.I. (byabrook80@hotmail.com).


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2023 - Volume #47, Issue #3