Neil from Messick's here today to show you my latest failure we have had great success uh selling brush guards for bx series tractors sway bars to make your three-point hitch more adjustable. This little tractor is so popular that you know we can justify the work to go through and kind of create things in order to improve your tractor and find enough of a market to make it profitable. The next product that has always been in the back of my mind the one thing that I have always wanted to do for this tractor before we even got into the sway bars and the brush guards was an upgraded air ride seat. So today we're going to talk to you about my failed journey in trying to create an air ride seat for a bx.
So with those things complete, the next thing I thought I would work on would be an improved seat for a bx series tractor
it is extremely common for us to hear from operators of equipment as they're out in the field wanting to improve the ride of their machine somehow and that is frankly runs across the gamut of equipment right it could be utility tractors skid loaders zero turn mowers you name it when you're running this equipment out across rough ground it can be a rough ride right and if your body is not up to taking that shock and knocking around looking for alternatives to improve that seat quality is a common thing for people to do. So I thought I would try to tackle this for the bx series tractor and ended up with this. So this is the prototype of my upgraded bx series seat I have a couple of goals when we were putting this together and really the primary one was to use as many of the existing parts as possible. When you start shopping for these components seats are phenomenally expensive.
It's not unusual in a big agricultural tractor for a high-end air ride grammar seat to cost three and four thousand dollars. Even seats for smaller equipment are often a couple hundred bucks to replace. It is an expensive and costly piece so I wanted to maintain the compatibility with the existing seat and only add some extra components down here in the bottom in order to add an air ride undercarriage between the seat and the tractor. This is an aftermarket undercarriage call it's sourced through a company called ani it's a very common aftermarket parts supplier that we use. These are compatible with a lot of the bigger utility tractors now it's usually used on machines that are 50 60 70 80 100 horsepower in those applications. Here on the bx though it causes a handful of problems and you'll see why.
The next part here was to maintain the slides that are down here between this plate and the slides so that we could still move the seat front and back have all of our same attachment points for things like seat belts was really just this middle adapter plate. In my mind we should make adapter plates to be able to have a couple bolts to put this thing on between the seat and the tractor and we're good to go but it's a little tall so I don't know how I look to you but I feel high sitting on this machine already. I'm pretty average 5 foot 10 and when I sit up here I can still keep my feet down on the floor but I'm reaching for the steering wheel and the pedals and the levers are all down fairly low if I had to say shift from high to low range down here I'm reaching down to what feels like nearly my ankles to get there. The levers to turn my mower deck on and off again same thing I can reach the lever fine in its upper position but to take that lever and engage it I have to lean forward and push down. However, I thought I had a glimmer of hope here at one point because the bx23 has a taller steering wheel than what the rest of this series does. That's because of the swivel seat plate that sits underneath this tractor so I thought by adding that steering wheel onto this tractor bringing the wheel up about an inch and a half or so i'd be able to make this work but you're missing something here yet.
I want an air ride seat right right now my seat's collapsed if I bounce up and down here I'm not getting any cushion whatsoever this is no better than what a regular seat is so if I sit down here and start inflating the air bladder in the air ride so I get that cushion that's going to help improve the ride, I'm going to raise myself up and as I do that, now you start to see where the problem is. Even getting an inch or so of ride in here a little bit of bounce and I feel like a four-year-old with my feet off the floor. I've almost got to point my toes down here in order to reach the floor pan and driving like this will be really difficult and talking about those levers again, they're way down here. So this is kind of where we ended up. I thought this was going to be a fantastic idea the next big messick product but my goodness this is a little silly and it just doesn't seem like there's enough space underneath the seat here to be able to fit all the components in and still leave the travel space that's needed for the air ride ladder to be effective. So that's a little bit of my attempt to fit an air ride seat onto a bx I'm not done yet. We're going to keep looking for kind of of other product ideas that we feel can enhance the different tractors that we sell, kind of cool unique things that we can offer up to you. And I thought that this one was funny enough, given how ridiculously high this sits, that I thought it was worth sharing. So I'm going to pull the components off of this tractor and throw them up on eBay.
If this is something that is actually appealing to you, if you see this video here soon enough, there'll be a link to an auction down in the description that will take you to eBay. And we're going to get rid of these pieces because this is not something I can actually bring to market, right? So if you happen to be an NBA superstar or you're somehow six foot six, and this just looks like a great solution to you, I've got one that I can fix you up with. So if you're shopping for a piece of equipment and we can help, or if you've got parts of service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
