Using the FFC Preparator to Prepare for Grass Seeding

Neil from Messick's here to show you an FFC preparator. I'm out here in my lawn today, doing a little bit of finish work at an excavation company out here doing some work, and are at the end of their work where you have a job site left over with some bulldozer tracks in it and some rough soils that are not quite ready for seeding. Going to take some time here today, run this attachment for my very first time, and show you how it works in different soil conditions. Now I've talked about power rakes a lot already, and I think it's important that you understand that the manufacturer of this implement would not view a power rake as a competing implement. In most cases, the power rakes are built by this same company. This is an FFC preparator. Now FFC is part of a larger company called Paladin that includes the originator of the power rake, which will be Harley.

The Harley rake was one of the very first implements of that spinning drum design. In their own catalog, when you go through and start to understand how they position these different products, this is more of your finished tool compared to that power rake that's going to be a little bit more of a deeper digging implement. We tend to sell more of these, and we also run them in our own rental fleet, which is why I'm using this one here today. It's going to do the job that I need to do out here, but it's what we rent, so we've got dirty ones around. Now, the reason why we tend to rent these is because they're very easy to fit onto any machine. It's only powered by a single hydraulic circuit. You don't need any multifunction controls, so you're not worried about meeting somebody's 14-pin or 8-pin adapters that are coming off of their skid steer in order to get those electrical controls back into the machine to say, angle and implement or something like this.

These are fantastic for rental yards because they're a true plug-and-play implement with very little to worry about. The cool thing that I have here today is that we have several different areas to work in. I ultimately need to do about an acre and a half out here today. There's a huge variety in the different terrain that's out here. I can tell the differences in the way this implement works, depending on what my soil conditions are like. I'm going to start out here in probably the best-case scenario that I have out here.

This area has mostly just disturbed top soil on it, and it's fairly dry. It's a sunny area, there's tree lines over here that have some more damp spots, but this is the dry part out here. This implement is made to be run in reverse, which sometimes is a literal pain in the neck. I just take my skid steer here, I have my hydraulics plugged in, and I hit my constant flow button on my remote, and wind this thing up the whole way. I find myself using this in a couple of different ways. You're going to notice here that I have the bucket opened up still, and tilt it down a little bit. That's because I don't really want to collect so much of the rocks and stuff out here. This is fairly clean soil. While it's running, that rock collection also ends up picking up dirt. I don't really want to end up with a bucket full of dirt down here at the end. By keeping that bucket, tilt it down a little bit, I'm allowing the thing to work and not picking up more dirt than what I really want. Down here to the grass. That's my first pass. You can see up there at the top where I first started in the soil, is the top soil is the deepest. That's a great job.

Now I'm driving back up here to make my next pass backwards. We're generally using this thing in reverse. I've spun around and gone the other direction too, but I'm not working for the camera. Back we go. I usually find myself needing to leave a good bit of overlap on each pass, partly because I'm not that good at driving in a straight line in reverse. We're making several passes here back and forth each time before we really get a good clean result. You'd also want to watch too, as you're using this thing that your implement is going to be wider than what your tracks are. I'm right at the edge. If I find myself needing to turn a little bit, while I'm going back and forth, I occasionally will get a bit of my track and stuff kind of hanging out the side of my finished area, which isn't a big deal, but it just doesn't look as nice when you're done. I can cook along here pretty fast. This is a 75 horsepower standard flow machine. I do not have high flow hydraulics on this. Usually when you do this, you're going to want to run it a crosshatched fret pattern.

I'm going to do this in one direction. Before I call this complete, turn around and run it in the opposite direction, just to make sure I get everything good and smooth. If you watch what's in my bucket here, I made four passes now, but my bucket towed it down. I got maybe a little bit of resulting dirt there that was left in my bucket. If you look at that, you'll notice, I see a lot of clumps, a lot of small stones and stuff that are about an inch around. My next pass here, I'm going to keep my bucket leveled out a little bit more. Then it collects better and we'll show you here what that looks like. I'm going to drag back here and smooth my pile out a little bit, bring this thing back to front and then throw my bucket into float so it drops down onto the ground and leveled out. We'll dump this out.

When that flattened out, I picked up about as much soil in one pass as I did in my previous four. You can see it definitely did do a better job of picking up the rocks and that kind of stuff. I got a whole lot more there. If you were trying to get this, I'm happy just to bury these. With the direction that this thing runs, it's throwing the fine soils and stuff back around the top of the drum and smoothing everything out. It's burying those stones and stuff as I back up.

If you had wanted to, you could go and keep a separate debris pile, or continually dump your buckets at the end of your passes in order to let all of that stuff accumulate and then scoop it off at the end. Again, that's going to be a lot less scooping, dumping at the end of your rows than if you're doing this with a Harley rake and you windrow that every time, and you have lines of debris to pick up between every pass. Harley's going to dig deeper. It's going to be a little bit more aggressive, but your cleanup is going to be more time-consuming than what it is with a preparator. If I was doing this a lot, I would absolutely invest in the backup camera. This thing will operate in forward. This the motor on here is bidirectional. I don't tend to like how I find that it runs. In theory, it's going to work now. I find I need to drive slower. I also find that I end up burying the drum in the front. I can see a little bit of soil kicking out of the top of the hood here that lets me know that the thing is working, but I could feel myself probably bearing the bucket or bearing the spinning drum there into the ground. It just doesn't work as well. It's bidirectional. You can, in theory, use it going forward.

Maybe somebody who's a better operator than I can... See how much dirt I'm getting there. Somebody who's a better operator than I can, may be able to pull this off. If you run these things, let me know down in the comments if I'm all wet on this. I intentionally ran over a small piece of plywood and a stake, just to see if I would pick up the large stuff. I could see the stake hanging out of the bottom of the bucket here. As we dump this thing out. That was probably about our ideal conditions that I have out here today, is that nice soil here on the front of the sand mound. I'm going to go back here along this tree line. We had some rain yesterday, and a little bit here this afternoon, too. When I go run along this tree line, if I walk out here right now, it is wet and muddy. Step in it with your boots and mush, squished, muddy. As I run the machine back and forth here, you're going to see it does still work in wet soil like this. I definitely could feel it dragged on the machine a lot more.

It takes a lot more of the machine's horsepower in order to spin that drum through the wet dirt. It doesn't work right as well. It is something I think you can get away with, though. It's not a case where this is an implement that's super choosy about its soil conditions. This is my worst case scenario, and I would say after I run over it, is it ideal? No, but it's definitely better. One thing that does happen to this thing, when you start to put it into places where the drum doesn't sprint freely, is you'll see the hood start to hop. That usually tells me that I need to slow down a little bit, right? When the thing starts bouncing up and down, it almost becomes self-fulfilling. When it comes back down and it hits the dirt, it almost accelerates it back up again, as it catches and then flips back up again. Doesn't it happen in the dry soil, but when it's like this and it's really wet, you'll see the hood start to pop up and down as that drum fights to turn, and it really slows down. This thing does not spin fast. Fast enough when it's in soft soil, but when I get it out like this, and it's really, really wet, you'll notice that it starts to slow down.

You just got to drive the machine slowly and give the thing time to work. Can you hear that as it pops up and down? If I just stop, let the thing spin, and then continue backing up again, slows back down. This is an improvement. Is it perfect? No. Would I want to run my Cedar right over it immediately? Probably not. I mean, it's really too wet to plant in right now, but it is still taking these areas where the various track loaders and bulldozers and stuff have been running back and forth on top of this soil. It's packed really hard, and getting it ready for seed.

In terms of unintended dirt pickup, right? If you're not wanting to be collecting a lot of the dirt and stuff and trying to leave the bucket open. When I'm running in this really wet soil, it definitely throws more stuff into the bucket. Makes sense, right? Your quads of dirt and stuff stay together more when the soil is wet. I notice that in the debris that's picked up in the bucket. It does a not as good of a job of picking up the stones and that kind of stuff, when things are wet and sloppy like this. Different spot. Now I'm sitting out here on top of my stormwater pits. If the soil here is a lot more clay, it doesn't drain out quite as well despite big on top of the stormwater beds. It's a little bit harder for the machine to work. Now, you'll see here, this is say half dry. When you look at the top of the soil here, you can see it's the top half inch or so, is that lighter, more powdery color. As we dig down into it, you'll see there's some moisture underneath. See how it goes.

That's doing a pretty nice job. I think you can make the statement there that the soil does not need to be completely dry, right? You're going to get your best results, the fluffiest soil and the dryer that it is. By no means, is this an implement that requires perfectly dry soil. That's a perfectly acceptable finish as far as I'm concerned. Like I was saying before, if I look at my spoils there, it's working and it's picking up what it's supposed to, but the wetter it is, I feel like the more ends up in the catch bucket than what belongs.

I did not do this today. It's something that I thought would be smart, if you're coming out to do something like this, since you're spending so much time driving in reverse, coming out with stakes or something and marking obstacles would be smart. I know where these storm water pipes are at because I've been looking at them for the last several months, but if you're working in an area that you're coming onto somebody else's job site, taking a couple of minutes and putting a couple of stakes in the ground where you might have storm water outlets, or down style pipes coming off of a house or something could keep you from backing over top of something.

Since I'm driving in reverse all day long, something with pilot controls would definitely be preferable over hand and foot, just because I'm running backwards, it's going to be a lot easier to be able to do that with one hand. Can't keep my other hand over here on the other side of the machine to really be able to use hand controls comfortably. Pilots are definitely going to be the better control stick option for an implement like this. I'm using some sense in where I decide to go back and forth here so I don't ruin the grade. I'm following the places here where the contractor set these swales so I don't flatten out their work.

Lest you think I'm a salesman who will only give you the positives about implements, right here is one spot where I think a Harley rake does work better than what this preparator does. This would be an area that just has clover on it, that there was no soil disturbed. When I back up here, you see why. The soil's hard for one, the hood is bouncing all over the place and it doesn't tear the grass out so much. I can go into this clover here and run my fingers through it and find that it pulled the roots out, but that doesn't give me anything that I think I could go into and see if I look at the... That's interesting, what's in the bucket, there is mostly filled with clover. I still have another pass or two over top of that to see if we get something workable.

Since a Harley rake tends to go a little deeper than this does, and it's got more weight on top of it, it doesn't bounce as much, and it'll go deeper down into the soil. Does this function better than what the preparator does? There with every pass back and forth, I've taken a little bit more of the clover off the top, and I've got buckets full of clover. That's handy, too. You'd be able to work this area and get it done to make it work. It's one area that if you're having to do a lot of this, that you probably would be a little bit more productive with a more aggressive implement that's going to till more of that dirt up than what this does. I'm also not getting much of a finish, right? When I'm in the other soils, it's throwing more of that top soil around and giving me that nicer, softer seed bed. After four passes here, looking at the calf, I'm going to throw my fingers through it here in a minute. I just don't get something that I would look at and say, okay, that's done. Right?

This is my grassy area here that we were running in and what's coming out of my spoils bucket, lot of clover. If I look here at the area, my finished top soil, well, this is a little loose. It's not quite like the regular area of just dirt is where it's churning down and prepping that top two inches, two and a half inches or so. Only the very top of this is turned. I'm going to use a slit seeder here. It's going to do a fine job of digging back into this again, but I wouldn't say probably want to broadcast on top of something like this, because we haven't turned the soil up quite enough. That's a little bit on the FFC preparator. I think it's a really handy attachment for any landscaper that might be doing seeding work, or if you're a contractor trying to leave your job sites ready for seed, as opposed to torn up by the equipment that you might have run around.

This is a really handy quick way in order to put that finished look on everything when you're done. Did a good job here in a lot of different soil types with me today. Not perfect everywhere we went, there are more aggressive implements that might have done some of these areas a little bit better, but overall, definitely a cool functional piece. This is something we're almost always going to have in stock. We sell a lot of them locally. We rent them, and we can do nationwide shipping for these things as well. If you're shopping for one of these and we can help, give us a call at Messick's. Also available for any parts or service needs that you might have, we're available at 800-222-3373, or online at Messicks.com. You know, from Messicks here out to show you, and come on. Every time I never get it right from the get-go.

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