School Bus Stack Hauler Moves Two Stacks At A Time

School Bus Stack Hauler Moves Two Stacks At A Time HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Bale Handling (5) 21-3-9 Using a tractor to haul one stack of hay at a time to his feedyard five miles away was too time-consuming for Ron Stear, so he built a double-stack hauler out of an old school bus to speed things up. "We can haul 30 6-ton stacks a day, which is almost twice as many as we could before," says the Cozad, Neb., farmer. He started with a 1976 Chevy school bus equipped with 3-speed automatic transmission and 366 cu. in. V-8 engine. He stripped the bus down to the chassis from the driver's seat back. He framed the back of the operator's compartment with 1 in. sq. tubing and enclosed it with sheet metal. He mounted a Deere 200 stack mover bed on back of the bus and mounted a 4-cyl. engine out of an old Ford Ranger pickup lengthwise underneath the bus to drive it via a 5 gpm hydraulic pump on the engine. Stear pulls a Hesston 60A stack mover behind the bus. Stear built a hydraulically telescoping tongue out of 5 by 7-in. tubing. It mounts over the bus's differential and 3 1/2 ft. of travel allows Stear to pull the Hesston stacker up close to the Deere stacker to transfer hay when loading. He pulls a stack onto the trailer and then transfers it to the bus before picking up a second stack. "Speeds of the stacker bed chains matched up pretty well," says Stear, "but I put a restricter on the Deere to slow it down a bit." The double-stacker's top speed is 30 mph loaded and 55 mph unloaded. Out-of-pocket expense was about $6,000, including the bus and Deere mover bed. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Ron Stear, 76411 Road 423, Cozad, Neb. 69130-5230 (ph 308 784-2408).

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