Hydraulic-Powered Saw Mounts On Side Of Tractor

Hydraulic-Powered Saw Mounts On Side Of Tractor WOODLOT EQUIPMENT Saws 27-1-27 Cedar trees seemed to be taking over Melvin Gengler's pastures and those of a lot of other cow-calf producers around his Beloit, Kansas farm. "I mentioned it to a neighbor and he said he was going to take care of his with a chainsaw," Gengler says. "There are a lot of trees out there to be cut, but I just couldn't see myself carrying a chainsaw all over the pasture." Gengler had seen tree cutters for skid steers and others that mounted on a 3-point hitch. "I didn't like the idea of having to back into every tree to cut it, and I wasn't going to try getting through some of the ditches in my pastures with a skid steer," he says. After giving the matter a little thought, Gengler figured the best place to mount a tree cutter on a tractor was on the side in front of the rear wheel, set far enough away from the tractor that he could drive by without backing up. He decided to use a circular saw blade, powered by hydraulics. He located an orbit motor to turn the saw blade and mounted it in a hinged pipe frame that's raised or lowered by a hydraulic cylinder. "I used a cylinder with an 11-in. stroke, but a standard 8-in. cylinder would probably work fine on it," he says. He figured there might be some stress on the saw as he moved it into trees (and maybe dirt and rocks), so he made a support for his pipe frame from heavy 2 by 5-in. steel tubing that attaches to the post where a front end loader would mount. "I figured pushing it off the post would be better than trying to mount it somewhere else on the tractor frame," he says. Once he had the frame built, he went looking for a saw blade but found nothing he felt would work. Finally, he decided he'd just make one himself. "I started with a 20-in. circle I cut out of a sheet of 1/4-in. plate steel. That didn't work as well as I wanted it to. So then I cut teeth into a 20-in. rolling coulter from a plow," he says. "I made several blades from coulters, with different sized teeth and different pitches on them. In testing them, I found a flat one with the finest teeth did the best job of cutting smaller trees." He also tested several different speeds for his hydraulic motor and found that 80 rpms was as fast as the blade needed to turn. "I just cut about 700 cedars on a 250-acre pasture with a little four wheel drive Deere utility tractor. None of the trees were more than 2 ft. high and it worked great, even though I was cutting them off at or below ground level," he says. Gengler's design is sufficiently different from anything else on the market that he's applied for a patent on it. "I've been looking for someone interested in building them, but I'm planning to make a few for sale in the meantime," he says. "I think it should sell for under $2,000." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Melvin Gengler, RR 1, Beloit, Kansas 67402 (ph 785 738-2807).

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