Steve, if you have neighbors on that drive, you just made brownie points.
No neighbors on this side of the hill so the road to the top of the hill gets quite bad between repairs. In the early 90's the county would plow it but then they stopped around '93. When it would get bad enough that my sister-in-laws got scared driving up it I would go fill in the washed-out center with a pick & shovel. It would take many days to get it somewhat passable, so I did it as seldom as possible. When I got a piece of scrap I-Beam I thought that might help. I was amazed at how well it smoothed out the road, but it only worked after a few days of monsoons wet it down enough or after I pick-axed the heck out of the high spots. Welding on the three center teeth helped, but it still only cut into the caliche after a big rainstorm. It was also a huge pain turning around as I had to dump off the cement blocks, move the I-Beam to the side, turn the Land Cruiser around, put everything back on, and make another pass. I was able to smooth out the road in a few weekends instead of a month of shoveling, but it was still a back breaking endeavor.
Building the box scraper was an amazing improvement in both earth-moving ability and time it took to make the road drivable. The biggest drawback was that without the restraining force of the third point (at the top of the plow) it would rise and fall over every hump in the road, thus the added cement blocks for weight, and it really tore up the last three feet of my winch cable. I also could not force a different slope into the road - I could only fill in gaps and smooth everything out so a non-four wheeled drive vehicle could make it up the hill. My wife has a Subaru mainly because of my laziness in keeping the road drivable over the years
I have used the front-mounted box scraper to fill in the other side of the hill where I do have neighbors, and will probably do the same with the new-improved three-point hitch model when the next monsoons hit. That side of the hill gets a slot washed out down the center and one down the side, and where the road crosses the arroyo it has often washed out to about two feet deep. My daughter's Honda got stuck in the arroyo crossing one time and I had to drag it out with the Land Cruiser. That rescue mission was the only time my wife has ever ridden in the FJ-40.
And if the soil is anything like it is up here, it probably just makes a lot of noise till moisture is added.
That was exactly the situation with the drug I-Beam, and kinda true with the front-mounted box scraper without digging teeth.
With the three-point hitch and the honest-to-gosh real digging teeth I am able to cut through the dry caliche about three inches per pass. What I found out last weekend is that I need to make at least two passes to break up enough caliche to collect it off with the box scraper. After one pass with the teeth down I have two grooves about a foot apart with a solid ridge in between. I then try to make the second digging pass six inches over, so I can break down the ridge. I plan on adding another tooth in-between the two outside teeth so I can break up the caliche in a single pass. Continuous improvement and all that
I'm concentrating on making the road slope opposite of what it naturally wants to, so the rain coming down the hill stays on the uphill side of the road until it drains into my culvert. Right now it naturally wants to flow down the center, and since I have never been able to change the slope before it continues to wash out the soft material I have been using to fill in the center. I was not able to change the angle of the box scraper when it was on the front of the FJ-40 - it was rigidly fixed to the two tow bar attachments and sat at whatever angle the FJ-40 was. Now I can raise one side so all the digging force is concentrated on the side I want to be "lower" than the other so I can knock off the high spots and dig trenches along the side of the road.
The digging teeth make an enormous difference and although I hated spending so much for them I would never use the box scraper without them again! I have more invested in the five digging teeth than in the rest of the entire box scraper.
) folks routinely use them in agricultural applications. Have seen pics of them in the past with one bottom plows and pulling discs too. And to think of how that old 5 hp Rototilller would beat the crap out of me and my cousin when we used it to till the large family garden we had. The 8N would come along later.....
