You see back up here behind me here there's a really large dead tree. We're getting our driveway paved here in a couple of weeks and eyeing that tree up, when that thing comes down someday it's going to fall right across a paved driveway, and I'd hate to see that so we're going to come out today with a little bit of help from one of the guys here in our shop that has a bigger saw than I do this. This thing's pretty large at the bottom to knock this guy down, and then we're going to spend a little bit of time moving it with pallet forks. Oftentimes I hear pallet forks referred to kind of as the poor man's grapple, right? You can use forks to move all kinds of different material around, including logs and that kind of stuff from this tree that we're going to fell here today. That's a little bit of a challenge. I used to own a grapple, I sold it here because of COVID inventory problems and haven't been able to replace itself. We're going to see how well we can do today using pallet forks.
So I've actually done quite a bit of work like this here over the years, I've probably dropped eight or 10 trees now, and had to clean up their tops and haul off their trunks to another place that I have over here at the side of my property, where eventually I hope to maybe cut some boards out of some of the better chunks, or at least have a good pile available back there for some good dry firewood once a lot of the more green stuff that I had to take down dries out. You can see here that there's going to be a bunch of challenges with this one in particular, this tree was entirely dead at the top and when it fell the top just crumbled into a million pieces. There's no tractor attachment that's going to make that part easy right, I'm going to be out here picking every one of these little sticks up out of the driveway in order to haul back to a burn pile here eventually.
The tops though, these larger sections, we're going to move with the tractor. Now it's a lot more efficient to go and use your tractor to move big chunks and then cut them up the firewood sides closer to your firewood pile than it is to be cutting things up out here. It also saves you from throwing all that saw dust and stuff down into your lawn where it's not usually going to decompose real well right, it will kind of act like a mulch there and give you a bald spot after a little while.
Doing this with a grapple would be really easy right, with a root rake style grapple with the teeth on the bottom you could drive into this and kind of collect some of this small stuff and then crunch it into that grapple to drive off. Or with a grapple with a traditional floor I could come up to these other pieces here now that I have cut up and grab them in just about any location and rely on those lids coming over to be able to lift and hold that log in place, but I don't have that luxury today so we're going to go at this with a set of compact pallet forks.
You're going to see as I do some driving back and forth here at the challenge with these pallet forks is going to be keeping the load balanced on the forks so that the logs don't don't fall off. And it's also going to limit some of the places that I can drive. I can't go up and down steep hills or across rough areas because it's going to cause my load to jostle, so take a little bit of time with me here. We're going to spend some time in this seat, get a little bit of work done. So this log here that I have now is probably 15 feet long and I was able to grab that pretty well with the center of my forks. As I putt putt along here you'll see that even driving on my stone driveway I'm getting a little bit of the sideways wobble of the log right, and I'm getting the job done right, let's not complain about that too much. But had this been a grapple those lids are going to come over top of the log and secure it in place here so that while I'm driving back and forth I don't have to be so conscientious of my wobble.
Also here on my tractor I do not have fluid in my back tires, that's part of why I have my flail mower here on the back of the tractor. Also on the back of this machine I do have wheel spacers. You see wheel spacers commonly done on a lot of the really small tractors. They tend to feel a little bit more tippy than the larger sizes do but I'm not the only one that runs my tractor, my wife and kids and stuff will get on here periodically and so I want all the safety factor that I can possibly get. So believe it or not while there's no factory wheel spacers for a lot of tractors there is actually a set for these. Kubota has a factory certified set of wheel spacers that you can put on the back of these tractors that you don't have to worry about warranty concerns or any of that kind of stuff with this model because it is actually an OEM option. When you look at those spacers and you say oh, an inch or two from a set of wheel spacers, what can it actually do? It does a lot. Even adding on a one inch wheel spacer makes a really noticeable difference in the stability of your tractor.
So for my first one here, I got tractor capacity to spare really. So I'm going to try to go here, fork this one and then grab a second. Now with my grapple not too much of an issue usually, my previous grapple rather. I could drive right into these things, push two of them together and use the lids just to grab and close around things. And how am I going to work into here? But somehow here not to be able to take two at the same time I need to be able to kind of line all these guys up and then be able to fork underneath of them in a way that's going to keep my loads in the same spot. And can we do the balancing act? Now I'm backing out of a swale here, you notice I got my loader up a little bit. I'll tell you 99% of the time when you see somebody and they're doing a tractor rollover problem it's going to be in times like that where that loader is too high and you're manipulating a load out there on the end and causing the tractor to kind of lose some stability or start rolling back and forth.
Anytime you're pushing heavy loads like this, especially ones that can shift back and forth, you really want to make sure that you're keeping your loader as low as possible. This is not nearly as convenient as working with the grapple, there's no two ways about that. Being able to just drive into the pile, use the grapple to push the wood together, hit the button to close the jaws around everything and back up and go, it's really handy. If you don't have a lot of this kind of work to do forks are a very reasonable way to get some of it done. I'm going to hit my limit here right? I mean, some of this small stuff I would have been able to push together and bring out in a pile with the grapple, which I'm not going to be able to do it with the forks. But all right so that is a 20, 22 inch round, it is about 10 feet long and we're doing it. I can't roll back anymore so I've got too much weight sitting too far out on the end of my forks so I can't roll this. There it comes, back in to get it back against the frame. But even so I can tell I got more weight hanging off in this direction. Now it's going to happen with the grapple too.
One thing I always laugh at, we see things that guys talking about like my tractor doesn't lift enough. What are you doing? Every time I feel like I'm out working I pass the limits of what I feel is safe for myself or my machine regularly. And sometimes I'm confused by always wanting more and more and more. I think you really learning to be a better operator, learning how to manipulate your loads, understanding how your tractor's responding to what you're doing is going to help you get a lot more out of that machine than just simply bigger numbers right, the difference between being an operator and just an owner of a piece of equipment.
Take a look at my log pile there and you can see some of the other big rounds that I moved down here with this thing. There's a lot of tonnage, a lot of work, a lot of work to do. So that's a little bit of work I was able to do out here with the pallet forks as opposed to the grapple that I'm used to. Honestly, that was surprisingly decent. There is no substitute for a purpose built tool right? Having a grapple is fantastic on the front of your tractor. When I had it, it really probably spent more time out there than what my bucket did. Just really useful to have that tool to be able to grab and move material and manipulate stuff and do it very easily, right? There is definite balance that has to happen with a set of power forks. There's some inefficiency in how you need to push into things. There's the fact that I have to do all of this by hand when a brush grapple would be able to drive into a lot of this and just grab it and go. But in the absence of the budget for what is a fairly expensive attachment the set of pallet forks is a very viable way to do 80% of this work, and the rest I'm going to do by hand.
So let that be, if there's any important thing to know in this it's yes, we could do power forks, but also that the importance of having a skid steer coupler on your tractor, right? Proprietary couplers or machines that are going to have pin and buckets on them, often the ones you see in economy tractors or packaged price machines in order to hold cost down, don't give you the flexibility that you need in order to have these attachments to be able to come out here and do this kind of work. So being able to go through and set up a new tractor purchase in a way that gives you flexibility for a wide range of implements like pallet forks to move logs, which you probably never thought of when you were shopping for a tractor. So hope that's a little bit of helpful buying advice for you.
This is the iron fist grapple that has a really unique clamshell set up here on the front that grasps your load. There's some stuff on this grapple that I really like. Some things that maybe I think could be a little bit different. We're going to go and talk through some of the pros and cons of this new grapple design.
