Picked up the Kwik-Way loader.

[DavidBarkey]

Looking good Noel . Sleeve hitch is a good idea . It would give you a place to hang weight off the back that can be lowered to take weight of machine when not in use or as parking brake . I do that with the weight I put on the 3 point hitch on Frankie .

[propane1]

That's very well done in my opinion. It looks plenty strong, it can be removed without a trace. Nice job.

One of my design goals was that I wanted to keep the mower deck installed. That meant that the transverse crossmember, which pretty much has to go underneath the factory frame rails, had to be pretty small/low profile, to make room for the deck to raise and lower and not hit it.

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but to do that, the frame rails themselves had to be strong enough to support the weight and torque of that crossmember. So I took some 1/4" thick 4"x2" angle iron and carefully cut and drilled frame rail "skins" that I bolted and plug-welded "scab style" onto each outer side of the factory rails. That took the factory rails from being about 150 thou. thickness to being over 3/8 thickness. And it gave me a nice beefy horizontal flange that the crossmember bolts are hanging from.
Here's a look at the driver's side frame rail right at the base of the steering tower:

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It preserves the factory look and feel, which was important to me. And like your subframe, the loader structure can be completely removed for maintenance. Which I've already had to do once. Total pain, but doable.

So I took a route that was more involved and more labor intensive. But yours looks great.

Bob

Thank you Bob. We don’t have a mowing deck for this tractor, just the snowthrower. Very nice how you did yours.

Noel

[propane1]

Looking good Noel . Sleeve hitch is a good idea . It would give you a place to hang weight off the back that can be lowered to take weight of machine when not in use or as parking brake . I do that with the weight I put on the 3 point hitch on Frankie .

Thanks Dave. I guess I should have bought the sleeve hitch from Eugen when I had the chance. Oh well. Funny how things change. My son and I will make some thing for the rear someday. I’d like to do some tree pulling someday, cut tree down and hook to a type of sleeve hitch and lift the tree up a bit and drag it out.


Noel

[thebuildist]

It was nice of Case to provide mounting tabs on the rear axle for the subframe .

Always thought those were to mount a sleeve hitch.

Yes they are , but sure are convenient place to mount other stuff . I have torsional rods bolted from there to the frame on Frankie to stabilise the rear axle on the frame under load .

Me too. If you're hanging very much off of your sleeve hitch or three point hitch, that's a lot of rotational force on that rear transaxle. And the frame is terribly thin where it bolts to the rear transaxle.

If you intend to use the back end of your tractor for any kind of heavy work, I heartily recommend this mod.

Represented by the blue rods in the drawing that I posted earlier.
On my machine those blue rods are 1 in solid round bar. But it wouldn't need to be that beefy. That's just what I had on hand.

[DavidBarkey]

Looking good Noel . Sleeve hitch is a good idea . It would give you a place to hang weight off the back that can be lowered to take weight of machine when not in use or as parking brake . I do that with the weight I put on the 3 point hitch on Frankie .

Thanks Dave. I guess I should have bought the sleeve hitch from Eugen when I had the chance. Oh well. Funny how things change. My son and I will make some thing for the rear someday. I’d like to do some tree pulling someday, cut tree down and hook to a type of sleeve hitch and lift the tree up a bit and drag it out.


Noel

There not hard to make . I saw plans for one somewhere .

[propane1]

So a little done today. And we are leaning now to use a separate pump to run the loader. So we we’ll see on that. Put another plate in today. We may put a brace from where my hand is from our frame work to the tractor frame. But we’ll see about that too. Once things are done. Arms from uprights to front of tractor will brace things up good. Still have to do that yet. And figure on pump mounting.

Noel

[propane1]

On to the upright braces. More fabricating.

Noel

[propane1]

Son is getting more done. The front bracket to hold the upright tower bracing arms is done. It’s unboltable and is very solid. Mounting a pump will be next.

Noel

[JSinMO]

Wow you guys are moving right along! This thing is going to ready to go to work in no time!

[DavidBarkey]

i like how you split the load over both sides of the front axle .