harley rake on plowed ground

This is a comparison of a harley rake vs a comparably sized rototiller. The ground is sod on a clay base, a little wet. You can see water in the furrows to the left of the tractor. On the right side you'll see what the tiller puts out after a single pass. This pass I'll make with the harley rake to provide a comparison.


Click on the pictures for a bigger version, and use the bushes in the background to orient yourself. So the row immediately to the left of the tractor is a pass with the harley rake, and further left is the tiller. The harley rake didn't do a very good job. The big clumps of sod and clay got caught up in it, and it ended up dragging a lot of material; enough material that it stopped forward progress of the tractor, so I had to lift the implement and back up. The tiller just chewed up the sod and laid down a bed that was ready to go in a single pass.

Ok. So lets see how the harley rake does filling in a furrow. The water filled furrow in the center of the picture is about 18" deep. Here goes.

Ok -- it did fill in the furrow a little bit, but the finish is uneven, and as last time, I had to stop, fiddle with the implement, and go forward a bit. To get a finished seed bed I'd be happy with would take another complete pass.

Summary: Harley rake is not the implement I'd choose to level plowed ground. I'd rather use a disc or a tiller. In this particular job I had to use a tiller because of the close quarters work. If I had a wide open field, a disc would do as good a job and be much faster than tilling. The harley would take 2 passes to get a consistent surface that the tiller achieved in 1 pass.

Using the harley rake to lay out driveway gravel

yes, its not an animal post, but I've been getting questions about my harley rake, so i took pictures of my brothers driveway that we're using it on.

The project summary is to make a circular driveway in front of my brothers garage. So the tractor bucket got used to pull up the existing slab and break it up. (get bucket under the edge of the slab, lift, hit the slab with a sledge hammer, slab breaks, repeat)

Then we dug out some dirt and tossed the riprap into the hole, and then dumped some 2-4" quarry spalls and did a rough grade with the bucket.

You can see a pile of 2x4 quarry spalls to the left. On the right is a pass from the harley rake, and then another pass. Quarry spalls are big rocks; they are hard to spread with something like a box blade, but the harley does a pretty good job of it. The thing that the harley does not do is compact the rocks after the pass. The surface is pretty level, but if you were to drive a car over it you'd get pockets because of the rocks shifting to "lock" themselves in. The goal at this stage is to get a rough level 4" or so below the level of the blacktop. So we're not using the grading wheels on the back of the harley rake, we're using the roller. You do that by tightening the toplink on the implement.

These two pictures show a pretty typical run with the rake. I'm dragging a half yard of the 2-4" quarry spalls behind me at this point but leaving a 7' wide smooth bed of them. Look at the position of the dirt pile in the background and you can get an idea. These shots taken while the tractor is moving forward at 1mph

Could I get results like this from a box blade? I couldn't. The quarry spalls tend to get under the blade and lift the box blade up; it requires constant up-and-down for a box blade to leave a rough level. The harley does it in one pass, but this isn't really where the harley shines.

Here's a look at the bed after this pass. Notice that there's a 'curb' on the right side of the picture where the edge of the rake was. I was cutting down to the level we wanted the finished grade to be. You can spread, take up, or drop gravel with this tool.

Here's a truckload of 3/4" clear gravel that will be the finished surface. The bucket drops small piles over the work area and the harley rake will spread it.

Here's the finished gravel spread over the area at a uniform depth of about 4". There were a few quarry spalls that stuck up through the gravel. I used the harley rake to rake the big rocks out of the small gravel and drop them in a low spot nearby. That sort of sorting on the ground is where this tool really shines.

This is the finished grade. 4-6" of quarry spalls on clay with 4" of clear on top of it. Eventually he'll want to pour concrete over the clear, but he wanted to drive around on it and compact it for a few months. so we left it in a pretty good place. No more dirt into the garage.

Tilling and the harley rake

A cold, blustery day today. Temps in the 30s, mixed rain and snow.

I purchased this harley rake (the thing on the back of the tractor) to grade and rehab land, both for myself and for others. It works very well to spread materials (like gravel, for instance) or on relatively dry dirt, provided there's no long grass. But I'm an optimist, and I did a couple of passes over a part of this pasture I'm tilling for the neighbor. The wet dirt pretty much glued itself onto the action part of the harley and it really didn't do much.

So I got my tiller and tilled it. Using a tiller isn't as fast as using a plow, but it's a little more controlled in this small space, and chops up the grass and stringy stuff so that I can do a pass with the harley rake without the harley getting gummed up too much.

This is what it looks like after a pass with the tiller. The sod is chopped up into fine particals and it's tilled about 4" down from the surface; for the gardening that they want to do that should be fine. The next step is to go back and till the higher parts deeper, maybe 8-10 inches, and then use the harley rake to make it golf-course smooth.

The dollar bill is in there for scale. Dollars are 6" long, so the depth of tilling is about 4".

When I till and harley rake my pastures I do it so that the mobile pens for the chickens are flat on the ground, to prevent predators from getting in, and chickens from getting out. I've also found that depressions can lead to mass smotherings of young birds. They don't tend to pile on top of one another if the ground is flat.