Did me some welding yesterday...

With my new plasma cutter and my fairly new MIG just sitting in my barn, I just had to do some fabricatin' yesterday. The first is a hitch that I designed several years ago and sold a few of on eBay. The insert in it is one designed to move gooseneck or 5th wheel trailers. You can use any insert that goes into a 2" receiver. Ya know, it's funny how that exact same hitch came up as an advertised item on the other site about a year after I designed and built it! Theives!!

The second, and not yet painted, hitch is one that I made after seeing one similar at a FFA show in Louisville, KY a year or two ago. It's not in this pic, but I welded a grab hook on the back of this model so you can chain the hitch to the tow bar of the tractor. That way, if you are towing a wagon or trailer down a hill, the hitch cannot raise up and create havoc.

I know the pics are of poor quality. I just took them with my phone. I didn't feel like walking up to the house to get a real camera.

Ah ha! My newly rigged wire/cable layer for a 3 pt hitch I made also works. This rigging is set to lay the wire exactly 3" below the surface in it's current configuration. From about 7pm until about 8:30pm yesterday evening, with the help of one other guy, I laid 2500 feet of wire for an invisible fence. I have to do about 1500 feet more. We would have finished that last night, but I ran out of wire.

If anyone is interested, I can get pics of this project as well. If you have a sub-soiler, you can make it into the same thing in about 20 minutes and around $4 of items. Since it rained about a quarter of an inch last night, I can't even tell where I laid the wire...which reminds me...I'm not finished. I better be able to find the end.

Brent, I would love to see photos of it. I made one out of my sub-soiler and used it a while back. Worked great. But I never made a wire spool holder for mine. What did you do to hold your wire spool? I simply fed mine of the box (I was burying about 100' of electrical line). But for long runs, I would never consider doing it that way. Also, did you make anything to re-tamp the soil? That was a shortcoming with mine, it split the soil but didn't press it back into place. I have an idea on what to do, but don't have the need to build one!

My spool holder can hold a 1000' spool of 12 gauge single conductor wire. I have skid shoes to keep the depth consistant and where I want it, and a trailing skid that mounts on that applies about 300 pounds of flattening pressure over about a 6" area. I really can't see where I've been except the slight tracks from the tractor. It's frickin' raining today and I have two business Christmas parties to attend yet today.

If you don't need to make one soon, I'll clean up my "prototype" a bit and paint it. My wife tells me I ought to be embarrassed about showing the one hitch that is not painted. The lime green Clark forktruck parts are sort of ugly. But, hey, I was invited to dumpster dive for steel in the scrap bin at a Clark forklift place for a while. You know, new steel is expensive!

I'm in no rush to modify mine, but the skid shoes are what I should have put on mine. I'd like to see yours. Can the skid shoes be adjusted up or down to allow for the cable to be set deeper into the ground?

My idea was to put a series of evenly spaced holes up the back of the sub-soiler and use top-link pins to lock in skid shoes. The skid shoes could be adjusted up or down the back of the sub-soiler by simply pulling the pin and repositioning. This would allow the subsoiler to work at different depths so high voltage wire could be deeper and low voltage wire could be just under the surface.