#65 Clamp on Trailer Hitch Major Flaw and Mod! Kubota B2601 compact tractor.

welcome back to the channel i am really glad you're here because today i'm going to show you a fatal flaw with this clamp on receiver and how to fix it [Music] welcome to my cluttered garage in video number 57 i demonstrated how this handy clamp-on trailer hitch works in video number 62 i found a pretty disturbing discovery and that was that my bucket had a dimple in it or a dent and it was caused by this clamp on trailer hitch so in looking at it further i found that there's one major design flaw i'll show you what that is now these buckets are made with about 3 16 inch thick material but along the bottom there's this quarter inch cutting blade and that gives some strength and durability to the front of the bucket but it also causes a little bit of a step back because you've got one quarter inch welded to the underside of this 3 16 inch now the underside of my bucket's pretty dirty but you can see the difference right here where this is the bottom of the bucket and then you've got this quarter inch that's welded to it which adds that thickness just to that front piece there so there's a bit of a step back here so let's imagine this is a cutaway view of your bucket your bucket's made of this 3 16 inch material but then you've got that quarter inch cutting blade on the very front so we'll use this piece to mimic that cutting blade on the front so you've got this step that we saw on the side view now what they did to compensate for this difference in thickness was they welded on this piece of key stock and by doing so it levels the hitch fair enough but here's the problem i'm going to use this thin piece of sheet metal to represent the bucket now this is only about a sixteenth of an inch thick but it's still the same principle and i can show you exactly what happens when you tighten this down on your bucket look how it bends that material now this is a bit exaggerated but this is exactly what happens you're putting the pressure on that bucket with nothing underneath of it to support it now there's a couple ways to remedy this and the easiest way would be just to get a piece of material that would be the same thickness as that block on the back that way when you clamp down you're clamping down on top of a piece instead of on that open gap underneath now the other thing and what i'm going to do here today is i'm going to grind off this key stock and i'm going to weld on a thick piece of material because this is going to do two things for me first of all it's going to take up that gap so i'm not clamping down on that gap it's also going to give me a little more surface area that will give that hitch a little bit more strength and hopefully not bend the bucket but i'm also going to do something else you've got this round piece which clamps down on the top of the bucket so i'm going to leave that there but i happen to pick up this nice piece of 3 8 round stock or round piece so i'm going to take this and attach it so again i have more surface area and it should give this thing a lot more strength so the first thing i'm going to do is clamp this onto the bucket and grind this keyway off of here i'm also going to take off this plate on the bottom to give myself some more room to work [Applause] [Music] do my grinder wheel won't fit behind this to grind that back weld off so hopefully i can just break it off [Music] well at this point i'm practically ground all the way through it so so much for the hammer and the chisel i think we just need to grind it all the way off straight through now before i weld this piece onto this piece i'm going to drill a hole through so that if i ever have to get this allen screw out i'll be able to screw it right through the hole one great thing i learned in machine trades in high school is when you're tightening up a chuck whether it be a lathe or a drill tighten it in all three places because well i don't know the physics of it but it does make it tighter than if you were just to tighten it in one place you really should clamp your work down now i'm going to slow this down to about 650 rpm by changing the belt direction or not direction but location [Music] there we go just clean that up so it'll take a nice weld so the rest of this should go pretty easily now the first thing i'm going to do is weld this bigger foot on here because i'll be able to use this to hold the plate in place while i weld that so we'll start with this and then move on to that i don't use my hobart handler 140 welder very often but when i do i'm glad i have it okay now i've centered this half inch piece flat stock on the bottom it's just sitting here i'm going to weld it across the front here but i'll use the clamp itself to hold it in place we'll tack it along there put a couple tacks on the bottom and then we'll test it out [Laughter] [Applause] well let's try this thing out for size [Music] definitely added a few pounds to it [Music] [Music] that is nice because now i can clamp this thing down as tight as i want without worrying about bending the bottom of the bucket it even feels more secure really nice let's take a look at the top and i'll show you the bottom so there's the bigger clamp or the bigger foot the one that it comes with is about inch and a half and this is four inches now so i've got that much more surface area let's take a look underneath the easy way so you can see this much bigger surface area to give this that much more strength and keep in mind when you use this hitch and you put the weight on the front of the hitch and you're you're basically pulling down on this it's transferring all that weight back up to here it's acting like a fulcrum and it's pushing up against it so by having this extra surface area you're really protecting the bottom of that bucket so if you have one of these clamp on hitches and a welder there's a fun little project for you and this was pretty inexpensive i went to my local steel supplier and they sell scraps or project pieces these were pre-cut i just pulled them out of a bin they charged 50 cents per pound so i might have spent four dollars on this project not too bad and it made a tremendous difference i can feel it already so if you like the video i hope you'll consider giving it a thumbs up if you've not yet subscribed to the channel i invite you to do so and i hope that you'll join us at 7 pm eastern time on monday evenings for one of our live streams until then thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: My Cluttered Garage - Outdoors and DIY Projects

Views: 11,337

Keywords: kubota, kubota b2601, kubota b series, kubota lx series, kubota l series, kubota compact tractor, kubota subcompact, woodland mills wc68, land pride sgc0660, land pride finish mower, land pride rototiller, land pride rgr1258, rga1258, land pride grapple, woodland mills wood chipper, outdoors channel, tractor maintenance, new tractor owner, homesteading in nj, homestead channel, beekeeping, clamp on trailer hitch, clamp on receiver hitch for loader bucket

Id: 99LBQH59yGc

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021