"Made It Myself" Solution To Costly Soil Drainage

"Made It Myself" Solution To Costly Soil Drainage MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Earth Movers 25-6-32 No matter what he did, Armand Poncelet always had to leave 10 to 20 acres unplanted in every quarter section. Some areas were just too wet to plant. Rather than continue to lose income from some of his best-producing land, the Whitewood, Saskatchewan grain and cattle producer figured he could cut shallow drainage ditches into the wet areas and direct the water into surrounding slough areas. When he couldn't find the kind of tool he needed to cut those drainage ditches, he designed and built his own. "I'd seen the small V-plows used on the fronts of road graders and figured that would be just right for cutting ditches," he says. So he began looking around for a used snowplow by contacting Rural Municipalities (RMs), which maintain roads in rural Canada. "I figured I'd have to truck one in from some distance," he says. "But the local RM had one for sale, so I was able to go get it with just a front end loader." Next, he needed a frame and axles so he could pull the plow behind a tractor. He used an A-frame toolbar off an old Morris chisel plow."Since the A-frame originally pulled a 60-ft. toolbar, I was sure it was heavy enough to handle the draft my drainage plow required," he says. He removed all but the center section of the toolbar and then added the axles, wheels and tires from a pull-type IH 914 combine. He removed the top flaring wings off each side of the plow, narrowing it by about 3 ft. on each side. Then, because the plow was made for pushing snow, not digging dirt, he reinforced it by adding a length of 1/2-in. thick, 4-in. by 16-in. channel iron from the back of the frame to the nose of the plow. "The plow has heavy brackets on the back where it fit on the front of the road grader. I adapted those to fit to the A-frame by making pivot points on the toolbar," he says. "This way, it mounts on the bar in almost the same way it mounted on the grader." He fastened one of the cylinders that had been used to fold the wings on the Morris deep tillage between the top mount on the blade and the toolbar to control pitch and depth of the plow on the frame. At the front tip of the plow, he mounted a tapered 4-in. long steel spike or probe. He made the probe from a longer piece of steel rod, and attached the back end of it to a 4-in. hydraulic cylinder, so he can extend it out to 12 in. "The probe breaks up soil deeper than the plow runs, so you can cut a channel up to 12 in. deeper without having to move much more dirt or use much more power," he says. "I used it last fall for the first time and went back with a tape measure to see how deep it had cut. There were places where I'd gone 32 in. deep," he says. He also used it to cut ditches in which to lay short lengths of 4-in. tile last spring, but doesn't know yet how successful that was. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Armand Poncelet, Box 111, Whitewood, Sask. S0G 5C0 Canada (ph 306 735-2833).

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