Road Grader

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  In the fall of 2005 we'd gone weeks without rain. Dry weather makes the washboarding on our road get worse and worse. The county has scraped both the other roads in our neighborhood three times since they remembered us, and we've got to take steps.

  William has spent some days studying pictures of tractor-pulled road grading implements and decided that, as long as looks don't count, we can do it. Besides, Mr. Haney is getting bored with pulling no more that trailers.

The idea is to build a frame that will pull two four inch high blades though the ground at a sharp angle, picking up the dirt and gravel , passing it over the blades, and spreading it smoothly behind. Such implements are available from several manufacturers, but that would be taking the easy way out.

The commercially produced graders come in a range of sizes from four to ten feet wide, for tractors from thirty to 150 horsepower. Mr. Haney being rated at twenty-five, three and a half feet seemed about right. Convenient, as that was how long the suitable blades we had were. Worn out cutting edges from road graders are readily available in our neighborhood. Add a fifty dollar axle and wheels from a junkyard,

a new cylinder and pieces of square tube, hoses that we got for digging a septic tank drain field,

and an assortment of metal scraps from around the barn

and Viola; The Worlds Ugliest Implement.

It works, too.

It takes several passes to do the whole road, but most parts just need the washboarding taken out of the wheel tracks.

The way it lifts the county's all-but forgotten gravel up out of the sand is a wonder.