Neil from Messick's here to talk to you about this attachment right here. This is a pickup broom. It serves a really important purpose here at our Mount Joy location. At this new store, we have a lot of asphalt and a lot of stones; about three, four acres of stone lot out here where the new and used equipment sits, and asphalt all around the building in our parking lots and in the service area.
We have trouble where these stones get picked up and carried to places they don't belong, and sometimes, in surprising quantities. Those stones then end up getting ground down into the asphalt by the heavy equipment driving over top of it. Periodically, we need to go around and clean this area up, and that's where we've found this pickup broom to be most useful.
Now, regardless of what vendors' pickup brooms you're looking at, they're all built in very much the same way. You have a brush, be like a normal broom on the front of a skid steer or other attachment, and a bucket behind it. That bucket is going to look a lot like your traditional dirt bucket does. It's shaped the same way. It often is still going to have a cutting edge across the bottom of it. That broom is going to spin here in the front of the bucket.
Now, you want to run your hydraulics with the broom spinning this direction so that any debris that passes underneath the broom is going to be picked up and kicked back into the bucket. That bucket then is going to retain the debris back there to a point that you can drive somewhere else and dispose of it into another area. Pretty straightforward concept, not mechanically all that complicated, but you're going to be surprised how many options and differences you can find between different vendors' brooms.
There's only a handful of options that you're going to find on these brooms. Most companies offer very similar configurations of the same ideas here. One of the biggest downsides to running these things is the dust that they create. Many companies are going to offer water tanks on here with a small electric pump that's going to spray water down on the ground in front of the broom to suppress the dust.
Now, that does cause it not to pick up quite as easily. That wet dirt now is not going to want to be picked up by the broom quite as easily as dry dirt is going to, but those water tanks are going to help keep the dust down if you're working in an area that matters.
I'm going to see some differences between brands and the way that they swing this hinge open. Some are going to use chains that go back to the loader boom in order to allow you to open this up to dump the debris out. Some are going to have differences in maybe some gating between the broom and the bucket that are going to change how that debris is collected. Many are going to offer optional gauge wheels out front to keep you from smashing the brush into the ground and wearing the bristles out quickly.
Lastly, there's going to be differences between these companies in the setup of that brush itself. Some brushes that are purely nylon are going to work fine in light debris, but they're not going to pick up heavy rocks and stuff, as well as ones with wire impregnated and mixed into that brush. The wire versions also tend to last longer. Unsurprisingly, the brushes are usually more expensive.
Those are some of the things that you're going to want to look for that differentiate these brands from one to the next. We here at Messick's deal with about a half a dozen different brands of these.
This one here is from Vernig. We think they strike a really good value between say, price and premium construction. There's a lot of steel in this. When I look at things like Eaton hydraulic motors, hydro-gear, manifolds, name brand, Gates hoses, you can see here that this company isn't picking the cheapest stuff that they can find in order to build this implement. It's good stuff that if you need a part down the road, it should be easy to come by.
We're going to do some cleanup here, and a New Holland C345 with a Verning brush on the front.
Fire this guy up. Start spinning our brush back towards the bucket and put it on continuous flow, and just started driving forward.
Now, all I usually going to do here is just generally set the brush down on the ground. If you listen, you can hear when those bristles start to contact the ground. Whenever you're running a brush like this, it's important not to smash the bristles into the ground. You will wear the brushes out, and brushes can be costly on this kind of thing. Just dropping those bristles down the ground is going to allow them to spin around to catch the stones and flip them back up into the collection bucket.
Now, you can see as I go along here, as I look behind myself, they're a pretty decent job and picked everything up. If you're going over top of stuff that you have a hard time picking up these brushes will work better driving in reverse than they do in forward. That's really easy in this machine.
You see me, got a bad habit to look over my shoulder. I can look up here in the screen on the display that's in the machine and just watch my backup camera here as I back up. As I'm blowing this in reverse, as that brush is spinning and contacting the debris, kicking it back into the bucket, if it misses the bucket or the brush doesn't pick it up, it continues to kick it back here with the machine. Running these things in reverse gives you a second and third, and fourth chance for that brush to be able to catch that stone, catch the dirt, and kick it back into the bucket.
While they can be running forward and it's certainly a lot nicer to run them in forward, this is an attachment that is best run in reverse.
It's satisfying to drive along here and actually hear the machine hitting those stones, kicking them back up into the bucket. When I look back behind myself here to have a clean surface left behind me.
As you can see here, what quick work I can make of this area running back and forth here with a eight-foot wide brush over top of this bucket with this large machine. It's almost like blowing your lawn. You could take these nice wide swaths back and forth and get all of this loose debris, all the stones and stuff that's left behind after these machines are moved around the lot, and clean it up really quickly.
Another thing that's pretty neat here is I run around, I don't seem to lose stuff. There's a big pile. After I pick it up, you don't see the bucket having stuff dribble out the front or anything once it's gotten it.
We actually made this video twice today. The first machine that we were out running this with had hand and foot controls. You develop a preference over time for what you like to run. I'd say I'm comfortable on either hand or foots and pilots, but this would definitely be an implement where running it with pilots is nicer, I feel. Somebody that's used to hand and foot controls is going to have good control over the machine, but it is nice with pilots.
One thing you want to remember here is that the back of this thing is actually a bucket. As you go and curl the implement forward, you want to remember you get a bucket with a cutting edge there on the bottom. The last thing that you want to do is actually curl the thing so far over that you start to dig with the bucket. When you look at the construction of it, while a lot of this, the hood, the brush, all that's going on here looks a little different than the actual back of this thing is a physical dirt bucket.
I'm going to pass over another area right here that is pretty dirty, and you're going to watch a cloud of dust develop around the machine here as I go. Perhaps one of the biggest downsides of these things is when you're cleaning dirt with a giant brush, just like you were say a push broom, it's going to make a pretty significant cloud of dust as it goes back and forth. That's when the one option for these is dust suppression kits. They can be ordered through with water tanks and sprayers on them. They're going to spray things as you go to try to knock the dust down.
Now, presumably, it may not pick up quite as well after you've made the dust wet. In a machine like this in the cab, you're keeping yourself away from that as long as it's not a problem for the other people that are around you or for your job site. Even having that brush do something as simple as spin through that dirt and kick it back into a bucket, it's a mechanical dust pan. It does a pretty good job.
Now, as I go into my turns here, rather than dragging the brush across the ground as I turn, I'm just using my right hand here in order to lift the thing up. Maybe that's old habit from dragging ground-engaging implements around, but I don't like to drag things sideways more than necessary. Smooth corner, no big deal. You can make that. I don't think you're going to do huge problems if you drag it sideways, but it's as easy as using that hand there in order to lift the front of the thing up to get the brush up off the ground, lower it right back down again, and continue.
There's a couple of things that I like here about running this with the New Holland machine. You can snap this attachment onto just about anything, but different machines are better tube carriers. There's a couple of things that are nice about this.
Being that this is a pilot control machine makes finessing this around the attachments here really nice and easy.
I use the easy EZ EH adjustment in here to go through and actually turn that, slow the machine down to make the sticks a little bit less snappy, less responsive to give myself a little bit more precision as I'm moving around some of these tight areas. That's a handy function here that I thought was worthwhile.
Really dig the backup camera when it comes to having to drive and run this thing in reverse. I'm used to looking over my shoulder and continue to do that. You've got a great perspective at the back of the machine here that I believe you can probably rely on here when you're backing up. In fact, there's my camera guy creeping up behind me right now.
When emptying this, I've seen this done two different ways. The way that burning here does this one is that you simply tip your bucket forward and then your debris is going to fall out. Now, if you want to get some big stuff in here, you can either run your brush in reverse and flip things out or just simply flick this here and shake the lid open.
I've seen some other models before or some people who will connect chains to that hood and connect them back to your loader arm so that when you go into fold, that opening holds the hood open and allows you to swing the bucket out underneath of it.
That's a little bit on the use of the pickup broom. You can see it does a great job out here for us cleaning up our parking lots. If you've got a use for something like this, we'd be glad to hook you up. With the volume that we buy in, we can offer some really aggressive pricing on some premium brands, get you a good quality implement, and also really fair prices for shipping. If you're some ways away from us and you'd like us to hook you up with one of these, we'd be glad to. We keep dozens of them in stock. You can reach out to us messicks.com or give us a call at 800-222-3373.
