ADDING VALUE TO QUAD BIKES
19 February 1999
ADDING VALUE TO QUAD BIKES
A trawl through the entries for recent FW farm inventions
competitions revealed several items of interest to widen the
usefulness of ATVs. David Cousins reports
NO ONE could accuse machinery makers of being laggardly in producing equipment to fit ATVs. There are trailers, sprayers, spreaders, feeders and slug pelleters aplenty. But that hasnt stopped farmers and their staff closeting themselves in their workshops and designing their own machinery.
Quite a lot of this equipment finds its way into the Barclays Bank/farmers weekly farm inventions competition each year.
Gordon White, who works on 92ha (227 acre) Broomhill Farm, Coleford, Crediton, Devon, wanted to speed up the job of feeding roots to sheep. In the past this involved throwing fodder beet out of a trailer by hand, a process that took two people almost two hours.
Now the same job can be done by one person in a little over an hour, thanks to a land wheel-driven fodder beet feeder designed and built by Mr White in the depths of winter 1997/98. His feeder consists of a half-tonne hopper with a conveyor floor beneath it. The conveyor is powered by a wheel running against one of the feeder wheels and can be put in and out of gear by a lever reached from the ATV drivers seat.
Distribution speed can be altered by moving the conveyor belt drive to another position on the four-step vee-pulley and the tailgate can be removed to help with loading. Rather cleverly, the bottom of the tailgate slots into the conveyor and opens automatically when the latter is started, so the driver doesnt have to dismount to start feeding.
Theres more too. Once feeding is over, the hopper and conveyor unit can be removed from the chassis and replaced with a 600 litre (130 gal) sprayer or half-tonne fertiliser spreader. Changeover, says Mr White, takes a matter of minutes.
While they cant carry the sort of loads taken for granted on a tractor-loader or telescopic handler, ATVs can provide a useful service taking single round bales to remote parts of the farm. Perthshire farmer James Gilchrist built just such a loader in January last year.
His patented design uses a set of teeth that is lowered to horizontal ready to pick up a bale. The unit is than backed into the bale and a winch – either hand or electrically powered – brings the bale up to its transport position.
Mr Gilchrist says the single-bale handler provides him with a safe, economical way of taking bales out to stock. It can also be pulled behind a Land Rover or other farm vehicle.
While some stock-farm ATVs – especially those on outdoor pig units – pull sizeable feeders or trailers, most probably spend the bulk of their working life either inspecting stock or doing general fetch-and-carry duties. However, standard ATV racks are often of limited use for carrying bigger items, unless youre prepared to rope everything down with dozens of bungee straps. Or you could build your own specialised carrier.
John Weir, who farms near Creetown, Wigtownshire, did just that. He designed a simple feed-block carrier for the back of his ATV to carry four feed blocks and a front one that takes another two. The carriers can be quickly put on or taken off the ATV.
Mr Weirs system is to take the blocks as far as he can in a trailer on the back of the ATV. When the terrain gets too steep he transfers them to the quad bike for the last part of the journey. You could do the job without carriers, he says, but its far from easy hanging on to feed-blocks and piloting an ATV simultaneously.
While farm-built equipment to fit on or behind ATVs is relatively common, adaptions or alterations to the base machine itself are rare. There are exceptions. Sion Williams, who has a 465ha (1150 acre) beef and sheep farm near Welshpool, Powys, uses a variety of equipment behind the farms ATV, including a weed-wiper. While pleased with the quad bikes general versatility, he was concerned about the danger of rolling over on very steep land.
His solution echoed what farmers have done on tractors for many years; fit an extra set of wheels at the back to reduce ground pressure and improve stability. His ATV duals attach by clamp hooks on to a frame bolted to the existing wheel rims. The second set of wheels then tighten on to a spacer ring.
Mr Williams reports that the extra wheels improve the ATVs safety and stability on hills and make it practically impossible to roll over. They also give a flotation tyre effect on wetter areas of the farm.
Its not just UK farmers who have come to rely on ATVs, either. Nick Pateluga farms at Gibralter Station in the Falkland Islands, where the main farming enterprise is sheep for wool. His entry in the farmers weekly farm inventions competition was a simple device that converted the usual foot operated ATV gearchange to hand control.
The idea is not a new one, he admits, and a similar device is available as a retro-fit item. However his differs from some versions in being suitable for most makes of quad-bike and not needing specialist tools to fit or remove it.
Made from a Land Rover gearstick, the natural crank of the lever meant it cleared the quads fuel tanks without adaption. Its ideal for anyone who has less than 100% flexibility in their left foot or who simply finds the existing push-to-go-down-a-gear hook-upwards-to-go-up pedal irksome to use. However, Mr Pateluga stresses that this type of lever should not be fitted where safety or warranty is compromised.
And finally… given the NFU Mutuals astonishing statistic that one in four ATVs will be stolen at some point in their working lives, its important to keep them safe. There are lots of devices that involve bolting the machine to a wall or floor. Wilts farmer Timothy Butler went a stage further by designing a steel kennel for the farms ATV that keeps it out of sight as well as secure.
One end was cut out of an old 2700 litre (600 gal) diesel tank and three hinges fitted to the bottom of it to allow the ATV to go in. The tank is bolted to the floor and two padlocks secure the door to the rest of the tank. Not the first time a redundant steel tank has been used for such a purpose, but a particularly neat way of doing it. *