Earlier this year, we did a couple of videos of me putting in a lawn at a house that I just moved to. I had to take what was essentially an open field and go through to smooth out the soil, remove the rocks, hydroseed down a lawn, fertilize everything, and get it ready to go. Made it for a nice set of videos. What you don't see though often is what happens months and months after that, we did that at the end of June, which is not exactly the best time of year for putting down a new lawn. Two things happened in the month since then. Some areas of that grass didn't germinate super well to the point that weeds were able to come up and fill the area and I got a lot of weeds in my grass, which is not too surprising for a new lawn like this.
I since went through and sprayed a whole bunch of them often. I'm at the point, now that I'm ready to come out and overseed and put some seed back down again. I'm going to be doing that here shortly. Another thing though that happened was because this is new construction, I have a new sand mountain put in that really was soft and as that soil settled out, things got really rough and stuff. When I ran across there with my zero-turn mower, it felt like I was going to knock my teeth out as I'm running across some of those bumps. Another thing that happened too as I going out and seeding with my seeder, some of the areas where new soils had been put in weren't compacted to the point that I could drive that heavy tractor across those areas without putting ruts in.I can see when I look across some of these areas the exact path that that tractor took as it put seed down. In order to correct some of that today, I'm going to go do some overseeding, which is not the point of this, but today we're going to be out running the SCL with this Harley rake here on the front.
The Harley rake is the implement that we're going to look at and it's the one that we're going to use in order to take some of the bumps and stuff out of the lawn here so that I can mow across it smoothly. There is a huge variety of soil prep tools out in the industry. We mainly deal in two of them, the FFC preparator and the Harley rake. These are not competitors with one another. They're actually both owned by the same parent company called Paladin.
Paladin has scooped up a lot of these industry companies over the years. There's a lot of technology in these brands here at this point. There are some significant differences between those two implements. I did a lot of my initial work out here that Preparator. Predominantly, it's what we do the most in rental fleets because it's a very easy machine to put on the front of your skid steer. You drop it on the front of the machine and basically drive backward and it's going to work that top layer of soil and pick the rocks out as it goes. It did a really nice job out here. Today, we're going to be using the Harley rake and this is the other alternative. A Harley rake is generally going to be a little bit more aggressive than a preparator is going to, and that's why I'm choosing it here today. I need to be able to work that top layer of soil in order to get out these ruts and stuff that are developed here in my yard.
What makes this more aggressive is this spinning drum here on the front. You can think of this a little bit like a specialized rototiller almost. This thing is going to sit here and spin, these carbide nubs that are on here are going to work that top layer of soil and it's going to leave you a pattern after it's done, where you have some holes where the seed and stuff can collect. Now, I'm going to drill the seed down later with a split seater, it's going to make sure I have good seed to soil contact. Now, I'll show you in a little bit here, the arts to running this thing, there is an art to sculpting things with this as you go.
There are a couple of basics here that you should understand to help inform you how to run this implement. For the most part, you're usually going to see these with wheels on the front. They're going to act as your depth gauge. By rolling what will be your bucket function front and back, you're going to change how deep this thing rides in the ground. Generally, I'm going to go set those on the ground, throw the loader in the float, and then just drive in reverse. Now, this thing can work in either forward or reverse and reverse it's going to kick things towards you. Usually driving forward, you're going to want to kick things in front of you, and you're going to determine that direction based upon the direction you run your hydraulics, this drum is fully bidirectional. I have this thing set up to run straight.
You can also pull a pin right here and angle it left to right. If you're going through and you're doing a seeding for a new lawn, generally, you're going to angle this thing and as you drive along, you're going to have it kick all of your rocks and stuff to this side into a bit of a windrow. I'm not doing that here today. I'm just basically running the thing in forward. While this is bidirectional, as you're going along, you can pull some soils and stuff along with you to drop into those low spots. That's generally done with a set of plates that are over here on the side. Those plates can be flipped between being on the front and the back of the implement to vary the direction that you're going.
This first area that we're going to do right here is an area that my stormwater management had to be reworked. This is soil that was dumped here and then really got compacted. I'm going to come back and reseed this area, but the Harley rake is going to take that top layer of dirt and work it up and get it ready for seed. What I'm going to do here is turn my hydraulics, so I'll wrap my machine up. I'm going to set this up to run backwards, so we're going to throw it into float and prop it down on the ground. I'm going to set my catch plates as being just off the ground and then run this in the reverse direction. Now, as I back up, it's going to dig up that soil, the catch plates, there are going to pull it along.
Now, I got a good line of sight down where those catch plates are at there. As I see too much soil accumulate or, not enough, I can just use my right-hand control here to change what would be my bucket angle in order to set that thing deeper or more shallow and you can see there, I get a beautiful, perfectly smooth finish as I back up. Now you take a look at my finish down here as I backed up, this is one of the big distinctions between a preparator and a Harley rake. As I backed up here, this thing kicked all of the stones along and at the end of my pass, I'm left with all the rocks and everything here that we're are in the yard. That's great because it's put them in one spot to clean up, but I need to take a manual step now in order to deal with these. That's one place that I like the Preparator a little bit better because it has the bucket on the backside of it. As you're using that implement, it's attempting to kick the rocks back into the bucket where you then can drive the machine out to a place and dump a pile of soil that's going to be mostly rocks there when you're finished. I take this thing then at the end and do another pass in order to drag all this stuff off and get it out of the way so it's knocking those rocks forward as you go. That is part of the reason when you're doing a wide-open space to angle the thing sideways that way, as the drum hits the rocks, it will windrow them and then every pass that you do, you just continue to kick them over. Now, as I was backing up, I had that drum spinning towards me. Now I'm going to take my pile of rocks here and push them off. Now I'm going to run the drum forward.
Since this is bidirectional now, I can cut down here to my spoils pile. I just continue to kick it forward and push it off to the side. I find it a lot harder to run forward because I don't have the same sense of depth. I can listen to the engine and stuff, but I can't see the drum working as well as when I'm running in reverse, but you can pick these things up, any number of different kinds of equipment. You'd run them on skid steers and track loaders frequently. They sell three-point hit manned versions. I like it on the SCL here a lot because with my hands resting right on top of the controls, I have a really nice looks like skid steer, highly control movement and because I'm standing here over top of it, I can see it really well. Larger sizes are nice, if you're going to be finishing the entire lawn, you might want something bigger than this would be getting level and stuff a little bit easier having one that's six feet wide instead of three feet, but this thing's nice to use. The little stand-on loader is a great carrier for this implementer.
Behind me, here is another place that I've been doing some work. After everything here had settled out, I've got a couple of places now that I'm developing some ponds and stuff, some pooling in my yard after a rain. I took my tractor and dumped a little bit of dirt over here, and I'm going to use this in order to spread everything out. Now, the one trouble that I've had here, the one condition that's important to keep in mind is that this thing works much better with dry soil than it does with wet lumpy stuff. What I dumped in over here was wet, when I put it there. It's still wet yet here today and you're going to notice that it doesn't smooth everything out, nearly as nice as it does with dry soil. When the soil is dry, this breaks up the globs really nicely and this area over here where it's wet, it just clearly doesn't do quite as good of a job. If you could hear the engine fight in there a little bit too. This thing is 26 horsepower. It's a capable little machine, but when it's doing work like this and you bury that thing in the ground, you can find the limits of its horsepower. As I go back and forth here, I'm just continuing to watch for the high spots and using it almost like a box blade, dragging the soil to where I want it to try to get a little bit smoother finish. Again, if this would dry and work down into the soil so much more nicely.
In front of me here is another good example of the places I need to rework here. This is a scalp of the stormwater management pit that's over here. All this is settled out a lot. It's like I got this really low spot over here now. It's gotten chunky. It's not smooth. I had to dig this up with a backhoe at one point to trim the pipe off. We're going to fire this guy up and I'm going to run it here and forward. You can see there in my high-spot how the drum was a little bit more aggressive and took a little bit more the soil off and then just dragged it now out the slope.
This is definitely one of those things where I have a comfort level on equipment but could have a real respect for people who do this stuff day-in, day-out. This is definitely one of those implements that you have the potential to be really good at and be a bit of an artist with it. Where somebody like me, I know how this stuff runs. I can get out and be dangerous with it. A pro would be able to do some amazing work with this that has a hardy curb to it. I do think it's appropriate that anybody can jump on here and do what I'm doing today and be able to be efficient and get a job done. With no doubt, a guy who's a really good operator would be able to do some amazing work with this thing really quickly.
That's a little bit of my time out here with a Harley rake. Definitely a really cool attachment. A little bit of a learning curve, I'm learning two machines here at almost one time, but really does a lot of work very, very quickly and gives me a very good finish that I can walk away and be proud of. I started out here with a rake and didn't take too long until I thought, "Yes, I can make a YouTube video about this thing." That's where a lot of these videos come from, me getting stuff done around the home.
