[music] Neil from Messick’s here out today to show you a quick demonstration on the proper technique to back drag with your loader. I’ve frequently seen guys doing this wrong. If you don't approach your pile and back drag in a right way, you can do some quick damage to your loader. I’m going to walk you through that here today. The thing that you want to be mindful of when back dragging or really using any implement that has hydraulic cylinders on it, is that as a hydraulic cylinder extends, it becomes weaker. As that rod comes further out of the cylinder, it doesn't have the support of the rest of the cylinder structure. If it's tweaked in a weird way, it's not all that difficult actually to bend a rod on a hydraulic cylinder. Where guys get in trouble when the back dragging is when they approach their pile, they're often going and rolling their bucket too far out and extending these cylinders way far out, which then makes them weak. Then when backing over top of that pile and dragging it backwards, if you catch a rock or a stump or something you didn't expect, they're underground, you can throw a lot of torsion and a lot of forest backup into your loader cylinders while they're sitting at their weakest point. This is my simulated pile of back drag dirt here. When I go and approach this, what a lot of guys would often do would be to roll this bucket way out and nearly flattened the underside of the bucket here that they're going to use to approach the pile. You can see when I do that and I take that bucket the whole way around, I've extended those cylinders far, far out. If I happen to strike something there with the back of the bucket while backing up, I'm going to throw that, the bucket is going to pivot back up around and push those cylinders back up and potentially tweaking one of them. The right way to do this is still to do very much the same thing, but recognize that you don't really need to curve your bucket that far around in order to back drag. You can really go to almost half way and get that same angle underneath the bucket and still be able to drag the dirt backwards. You can see there, I did a nice, smooth back drag with a nice shallow angle on my bucket instead of really cranking the thing that far around. It might take an extra pass or two. It's not to say that you can't ever take this thing way over if you have a big pile, but you can see here, hey man, if I take it the whole way around and I stick that thing down in the ground and punch by front tires up, it doesn't take too much there to see the amount of strain that I'm putting back on those cylinders. That's just a short back dragging demonstration. In summary, the thing to keep in mind is this use the smallest rollback angle you need in order to pull that pile backwards. If you can avoid it, don't extend these cylinders so far out that you put them into a place where you could do damage to them when you're backing up. If you’re looking for a piece of equipment and we can help or you’ve bent your rollback cylinders, and we can sell you some new ones, give us a call at Messick’s. We’re available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
