Cultipacker

Looking for a cultipacker to pull with the atv.

Tough to find without spending big bucks. Cultipackers and old Deere 290 planters, I tell you. The shelterbelts and junk piles of western MN were littered with those back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now they’re selling on CL for $$$$$$$.

Single sections of old multi-section units are routinely listed for $500 now. That’s fine but there’s no transport wheels on a single section, so if you have to move it from place to place, you’re hosed unless it’s just down your own soft field road.

I’ve been kind of toying with the idea of building a custom one. Mrs. Grouse is going to flip out if I buy a welder, though.

Grouse

Agreed, they are very tough to find now days for a decent price, but they are worth their weight in gold for food plots.

There are a lot of great designs for home made ones out there for not that much money. Access to a welder or a guy that welds is key.

sticker wrote:

There are a lot of great designs for home made ones out there for not that much money. Access to a welder or a guy that welds is key.

I’ve been browsing various designs, but there are a couple of common issues I’m finding.

If you go with pre-fab cast iron packer roller segments, the cost goes WAY up and you have to find a place that sells the rollers locally or pay a sh!tpot of money for shipping.

And then the welding of the frame…

Say, errr, Sticker ol’ buddy. You don’t have 220 out in that big ol’ shed of yours, do you?

Grouse

Nope no 220 in the barn

If you are going to conventional route with the metal wheels/roller I don’t think you can get away cheap. A lot of guys are using corrugated plastic culverts for the roller and then fill that with cement for weight. This is a really good example of what I am talking about.

The 2.5″ or 3″ tubing on this might be overkill. I have seen many with just angle iron which would be a lot cheaper and less welding.

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Yes, I’ve seen that poly culvert design. I agree, in that example, the box iron is way overkill. Nice that the ball hitch fits it, but lots of added weight, welding, and cost.

I’m wondering how do they get the axle set so it’s perfectly centered in the culvert AND still be able to stand the culvert up to pour the concrete in? You must have to build a jig to hold the whole thing off the ground so you can stand it up vertically?

And then filling that bad boy with concrete would REALLY be fun because I want to make a 6 to 7 foot wide one. So that’d take some thought as to how to do that.

Grouse

I have made one out of a double wall culvert, it lasted 2 years do to the rocks on the logging road we haul it down. I think the key is to use a single wall culvert so the cement fills in the ribs of the culvert. I am thinking of using a single wall one this time and probably adding wheels for transport. When I made the last one a cut plywood ends for it with a hole drilled for the axle. I stood it up to fill it and hooked it to to a tree with a racket strap and carefully lower it down when filled

Agree, prices are nutso for them.

Had a bunch of tires and rims from 3 different Suzuki samurais. Used 1/2″ threaded rods an uncle gave me through the lug nut holes and bolted them all together. Put some threaded pipe through them with a crappy designed hitch off the pipe and put a coupler on it. It’s ugly as sin and poorly designed on my part, did it in a massive hurry but it has held up and worked well enough for food plots. It’s not super heavy, but heavy enough with 5 or 6 tires and rims that it presses the seed into the soil and compacts the soil enough for what we use it for. Have thrown around the idea of filling the tires partially with RV antifreeze, but have had no reason to do so yet. It’s ugly, redneck and red green engineered while chewing Redman as it can get, but it sits outside unused for 11 months out of the year so who cares.

Nitrodog wrote:

When I made the last one a cut plywood ends for it with a hole drilled for the axle. I stood it up to fill it and hooked it to to a tree with a racket strap and carefully lower it down when filled

Yep, that’s exactly how this one in the picture was filled with cement.

sticker wrote:

nitrodog10 wrote:
When I made the last one a cut plywood ends for it with a hole drilled for the axle. I stood it up to fill it and hooked it to to a tree with a racket strap and carefully lower it down when filled

Yep, that’s exactly how this one in the picture was filled with cement.

Does that axle go all the way through as one single axle? Or is there just a short stub of axel embedded in each end?

If you used stubs, how do you get them in and aligned correctly so they aren’t crooked?

Grouse

On the one I posted it’s a single axle all the way thru. He build up some blocks under the down end of the cylinder with 2″ holes in them so the pipe/axle had room. Placed plywood cap on one end, put the axle in, poured the cement in, capped the top end and let the cement set up. Then slowly lowered the cylinder down and mounted to the frame.

Go big or go home. Lol Even when we don’t have it filled with water it does an excellent job.
DT

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I bought an ancient beat cultipacker and re-bushing it and reframed it to attach via quick hitch or trailer hitch. All bolted together, no welding

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I was searching CL for a post hole digger and seen 2 48 inch sections in the background of a picture. I asked him if they were for possibly for sale. He said yes. $50 for each section. I only needed one section and that’s all I bought. Kicking myself for such shortsightedness. Put new maple bushings in it and it’s perfect. My brother in law has a two piece 8 footer. Cultipacking is the perfect way to get great soil contact with broadcast seeds, whether it’s food plot or native grasses and forbs. A lot of them fall prey to junk iron also, which is unfortunate.

There’s a 9 footer for sale on CL Ames for 675.

My neighbor had a pretty decent lawn roller sitting behind his shed, I never saw him use it so finally I asked him. Turns out he bought it for reseeding grass at his last house and he said, “Do you want it? Get it gone!”

So I did. It’s a smooth roller, so not quite as good as a ribbed packer, but still works great for pressing seeds to the soil. When filled completely full of water, it’s as heavy as I need it to be. Only downside is obviously it has to be drained every fall.

Also, I noticed right away that when you roll the soil, moisture you dramatically slow down the evaporation and loss of soil moisture. A big plus whey you have springs like ours where the “spring” planting season extends into July because everything was too wet to work back in May.

Grouse

What if you wrapped with some spacing between the wraps a braided cable to give the smooth roller some “texture”???