Neil from Messick's here today, out to show you a little bit about a Land Pride grading scraper. This is one of my favorite attachments in order to sell to new tractor buyers. It's one of those pieces that you very easily can drop right on the ground and go to work and get really good results from. Come along with me here today. I'm going to show you around this project that I'm working on. Maybe on of these things is right for you. 

When you look at the construction of a grading scraper, it shares a lot in common with a box scraper. Both implements are going to have scarifier teeth in the front that can be set up or down in order to tear and loosen the soil, and then two cutting blades that are back on the inside. The scraper is going to have two blades, but the box blade's got a rear one in the back. 

The scraper is going to be set up a little bit different than the box is, where the box is going to cut that material, skim it off and hold it inside the box, a scraper is set off in order to let some of that material to fall out the back. You're not going to accumulate quite as much of it as what you do in the box. The nice thing about that is that this is an implement that you can just drop on the ground and pull. Because when you start to accumulate so much material in the back, it will simply spill out the back and kind of grate itself off and smooth as it goes. 

As you're operating a box blade, it's going to accumulate that stuff in the inside and put you in a situation where you've got to start feathering your three-point hitch up and down in order to get that material to fall out of the bottom of the box and spread itself out. When you go back into that new tractor operator, sitting and feathering that three-point hitch is not the easiest operation on any of these machines. This is really a much easier implement in order to operate. 

Now, obviously there's pros and cons. There's a reason why the industry sells a lot of box scrapers as well. The sales of these things are probably about 50/50. This isn't something that you can do a lot of aggressive re-grading with. If you wanted to actually take volumes of soil, drag it off and deposit it somewhere else, this is not the implement for you. It's not going to going to carry that soil along quite in the same way that a box scraper does. 

If you look on the inside of these, you'll notice that the blades on the inside are cockeyed, they're offset a little bit. It's because these are a really common piece for maintaining stone driveways. You could take these and run it in a way that that material was going to move towards the crown of your driveway when you're running the proper direction and build that build that crown up so that all of your rainwater runs off. 

I'm using it a little bit differently out here today. This is in the area that used to be a cornfield that I'm renovating into a place that I hope to put grass into someday. I came out here with a really large [chuckles] tractor and took this field that had been no-tilled and ripped it with some ripper. It's a big 3-foot long shanks that went through the ground. After going through with that, it left the thing really rough and kind of unable to work back and forth. 

I'm out here with a B Series tractor today with this scraper on the back in order to smooth this back out again after going over it with that large piece of equipment. Come along with me here today. I'll show you a little bit of what I'm doing and talk about this implement as we're going. 

I've been out here working this for a while already. You're kind of coming into the back half of the work that I've been doing. I've already run one direction with this and now I'm running at 90 degrees where I was going before to tear out the humps in this. Like I said, this is a cornfield. The corn was planted perpendicular to where I'm going so it has developed some humps over the years. 

I'm taking a scraper and driving across this perpendicular now in order to rip those humps out now. I've taken the scarifiers off of this. When I was out with it earlier, the one thing that it was doing that I wasn't happy with was catching a lot of the debris that's here in the ground. As I'm going along, any of that corn stubble or weed and stuff that's grown up in here was bunching up on my scarifiers and then just drag it along and it wasn't doing the best job. Once I remove those, this time I'm not going to be as aggressive, but I'm not catching nearly as much trash and that kind of stuff out here in the field as I was before. 

You can see as I go along, this thing is going to scrape a little bit and then it starts to accumulate the excess dirt and it's going to drop it into the low spots here between the rows as I go back and forth. I had a decent result on my first pass, but now that I'm running 90 degrees to this, it's really coming out nice and doing a great job of smoothing everything now. 

As I'm going back and forth here, I'm periodically switching my tractor between low and medium range. For the most part, the box doesn't collect so much material that I can't move along really quickly in medium. Now, this area is really rough here. In the bloopers, you'll see my GoPro falling off several times. When the box does get full, when I get into softer down here at the bottom, I can start to collect enough material in the back where the tractor really starts to fight. That's the time you're going to go slow the machine down and step down in the low range. 

As I look here behind myself and I just watch, this is the roughest area of the field right here. I can see the amount of excess material that's in my box that starts to fill up when I'm up in the flat area and it's scraping and smoothing that out. When I get down in here into the ruts, all of a sudden it all starts to disappear as it falls out the bottom and fills in those low spots. 

Like I said, I'm a big fan of ease, especially for your novice tractor operator. Everybody has got a rough spot in the yard they want to maintain or stone driveways to trails, any of that kind of stuff that gets roughed up and torn up, this is the perfect implement for that. If you're going to go out, you're going to, say, fill in potholes of stuff on a stone road, you could go out with your loader bucket and dump excess stone into the pothole and try to fill it up but that pothole will continually come back over and over and over again until you manage to tear it out. 

That's where this thing really shines. You can take the scarifier teeth, drop them down so loosening that top layer of [unintelligible 00:06:22]. Rip the edges of that pothole out, then fill it right back in again and really take care of it instead of repairing it in a way that it just keeps on coming back over and over again. 

That's a little of my use of the grading scraper out here today and the ways that I've been putting it to work. I'd like to do a follow-up video on this sometime in another area that I have over here, where we've got a stone drive that needs to be maintained as well and show you a little bit over there how those scarifier teeth work and how one of these performs in stone as opposed to being out here in dirt today. 

If you have any tractors you need attachments for, parts for machines you've already got, service work that needs to be done or you're shopping for a piece of equipment, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800.222.3373 or online at messicks.com