The Kruncher Manure Scraper

The Kruncher Manure Scraper MANURE HANDLING Equipment 6-1-6 Art Nehring, innovative hog -farmer from Iowa Falls, Iowa, has developed a giant-size scraper specifically designed to scrape off glue-like manure stuck to floors in finishing barns. "The building we were concerned about is 365 ft. long. Cleaning it was a continual headache because of manure build-up. We ended up scraping the manure off manually because there was no room for a big tractor, and the skid steer loader had too little power and no traction. A high-pressure washer gets it but manure ricochets back into the operator's face." To solve the problem, he came up with the idea of building a giant pincer with teeth to fit his skid steer loader. He calls it "The Kruncher". "One jaw reaches out like a backhoe and slices the manure off the cement as easily as you could peel an orange. The opposing jaw is a pronged backstop mounted at the front of the tractor," explains Nehring. The hydraulic cylinders powering the pinchers are 4 in. in diameter and 6 ft. long. They exert 23,000 lbs. pressure, strong enough for Nehring to split wood between the jaws. The backstop mechanism is attached to 150 lb. iron arms bolted to the tractor above the back hitch. The leverage necessary to push the backstop down into the manure is gained by welding arms on the backstop beams at right angles. Hydraulic cylinders, 3.5 by 8 in. and capable of 17,000 psi, can exert as much as 6,000 lbs. of downthrust on the teeth of the backstop. "It was hard to believe that, after years of back-breaking labor, I could sit down and, with thumb and forefinger, do what took days and weeks of gut effort before," Nehring says. "You can use it in any barn with manure build-up, as well as for landscaping." He's interested in developing the machine commercially. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Arthur Nehring, 107 Michigan, Iowa Falls, Iowa 50126 (ph 515 648-2768).

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