Neil from Messick's here. Today, to talk to you a little bit about a three-point quick hitch for the back of your tractor. Nearly 500 videos on YouTube now, believe it or not, and in several of them, I've actually bad mouth these things a little bit. The dealership side, they cause us a little bit of frustration sometimes because industry standards between these quick hitches and your implements are not strictly defined. There's a lot of implements these quick hitches don't work well with. That gives us sometimes a little bit of a bad taste for them. 

However, if you've got the right implements in the right tractor to set them up on, these things can be actually really nice. Admittedly, I have one on the back of my own tractor here. I'm going to show you a little bit today of some of the ways that I like to use this thing. Admittedly, the first two things that I like about this quick hitch have nothing to do with implements at all. The three-point hitch linkage on the back of a tractor when it's not being used, there's no implement on the back, tends to slop around a lot. Your three-point arm's in the bottom, if you have the turnbuckle style and not the sway bars, tend to slop back and forth really easily. 

Tractors that don't have good holders for top links, those things can flop around back there. I like to see these on the back of machines partly just to have a place to tie down all that linkage as the quick hitch will hold it all together but still be available and ready here to hook up your implements. That's really handy. The second thing, something I was doing just here the other day, I was out here skidding logs and I have a clevis down here on my drill bar but when you're skidding logs, you always have this length of chain that you need to deal with when it's, say, not attached to a log and you're running back and forth. 

One thing that I really have come to enjoy, I say "enjoy," appreciate from the back of my quick hitch here is this big hook that's here on the top. This big hook is usually used in order to grab the top link on your implement but it serves an equally good purpose for storing a chain while you're driving back and forth. I've come to really like it for that purpose. It's a really convenient place in order to hook things onto the back of the tractor. You can also use this for skidding logs as well. If you back up to a log and you chain it here close to your tractor, you can use that top hook in order to lift the log up off the ground so it's not catching dirt as you're dragging it along. 

Actually has some good applications. It's a cheap way to have a long skidder. Now the main purpose of the quick hitch is quite obviously quick hitching your attachments rather than having a traditional three-point hitch with pins on it that you've got to get pins over top of the balls and adjust your top link properly. When you have your proper implement that's going to mate with a proper quick hitch, you very easily can just back up to the implement, grab it, lock it on and drive away. In order to lock that implement, I use these two handles here. This QH05 has these that move this direction. The heavier versions of this for bigger tractors use handles that flip this direction. 

Those are going to have little pins that kick out and capture those lower pins on your implement to make sure that it doesn't pop off. For something like this box play that doesn't have a PTO shaft, I can actually attach and remove this implement without ever getting off my tractor. We'll back up to it here. [engine starts] Slide the hitch underneath the pins. 

All right. Lift up and kick these into locking into place. Off we go. It's a good example there are some of the value of having that quick hitch on the back of your tractor. Maybe a little bit of an explanation to that. When you sit and you look at the industry and the variety of opinions that you're going to have on different attachments and how they work, a lot of times boils down into what it is that a person actually owns and what pieces they're trying to put together for a given application. If you find somebody who expresses frustration with that quick hitch, it's a very good possibility they don't have the right implements in order to mate with it. 

Just make sure these pieces all go together and you're going to have much better satisfaction with the money that you spend for that. In the Land Pride product line, you're going to notice stickers. On here, they say quick hitch system on them identifying which implements are going to mate right up to that hitch. As time goes by, we're seeing larger and larger swaths of most manufacturers product lines meeting right up to those things. Might be a little bit of money well spent. They're not terribly expensive in the $200 to $400 range depending on how heavy duty of the hitch you're picking up. 

If you're shopping for a piece of equipment or if you have parts with 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