Home-Built Deere Utility Vehicle

Home-Built Deere Utility Vehicle ATV'S ATV'S 27-3-16 Stanley Byerly needed a little utility vehicle to haul things like grass clippings, leaves, and tools around his New Salisbury, Indiana, farm. He had a dumping yard trailer and an old Deere model 72 front deck riding mower, so he decided to put the two together. To make the machine, Byerly first removed the deck from the front of the old mower and shortened the remaining frame so the operator's seat is slightly behind the drive axle. He replaced the original 8-hp motor with a 10 hp Briggs & Stratton. Then he coupled the remade power unit to the trailer tongue with an articulated steering joint that also allows the trailer to flex from side to side. "It's like a universal joint - or maybe half a universal joint," he says. "If I were doing it over, I might just use half a universal joint instead." Big articulated tractors have hydraulic cylinders at the articulation point. Byerly didn't see a need for that. Instead, he fashioned a manual form of articulated steering using a rod that pulls or pushes on the joint. He says nearly everything he used to make the utility vehicle came from the junk pile. He used a steering wheel from an H Farmall and a steering gear from a Fordson Major Diesel. The seat he salvaged from an old Murray riding lawnmower. In order to make the trailer and the mower the same height, he put the hubs from an old Bolens lawn tractor, along with the wheels and 12-in. tires, on the trailer. With the bigger wheels and tires, he needed more clearance, so he raised up the trailer body by removing it from the frame and setting it back on top of some 4 by 4-in. wood blocks. Remounted this way, the trailer still works the same. "I didn't have to change anything about the way the trailer dumps," he says. The only real cost to make the machine was his own time. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Stanley O. Byerly, 7155 Corydon Junction Road NE, New Salisbury, Ind. 47161 (ph 812 347-2186).

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