[AT] 3 point hitch backhoe attachments?

[Mike Sloane]

carl gogol wrote:

> Anyone on the list have any experience with 3 point hitch attached 
> backhoes? There a lot of them advertised and sold, but I had one dealer 
> tell me that they should never be attached that way and to use a special 
> frame attachment bracket instead.  This will avoid the forces generated 
> by the hoe onto the tractor from splitting / folding the tractor in 
> half.
I am a little late responding to this, and I see that others have had 
some comments. But I will add mine anyway.

We (the tractor dealership where I worked) sold factory mounted backhoes 
on some of our tractors. There were all mounted on subframes that were 
pinned to the tractor frames. We also sold Woods backhoes that could be 
either frame mounted or three point mounted. When ordering the parts for 
a three point mounted hoe, the Woods manual generally required a rigid 
top link mount that bolted directly to the tractor's final housing. But 
the bottom was still held in place by the regular lower links. We did 
not recommend this arrangement to customers, and I cannot recall ever 
selling one configured that way except for one Ford 4500 (which was an 
"industrial" tractor). We never heard back from the customer, so I 
cannot say if it was a successful match-up.

We did sell a couple of used three point hoes, but these also had some 
kind of auxiliary arrangement to secure the top link - I can only assume 
that the regular attachment of the top link would have been ripped 
off/out. Generally, the mechanics and older salesment warned that using 
a three point mounted hoe was very hard on the whole tractor. But I 
never heard of one "folding up" because of the hoe.

That being said, there are a fair number of three point mounted hoes 
being used around the county for cleaning drainage/irrigation ditches on 
the "black dirt" farms. But these machines are not being used to wrestle 
rocks out of the sides of granite hills or dig foundations in virgin 
soil. So I guess it depends on what you are going to do with the machine.

Mike
> 

-- 
Mike Sloane
Allamuchy NJ
Email: (mikesloane at verizon.net)
Website: <http://www.geocities.com/mikesloane>
Tractor images: <www.fotki.com/mikesloane>
Work: none - retired

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