Brand new to the forum and the FB group, this is my introductory post on a thread will hopefully be long lived. I have been pondering an articulated loader build for a few months now. I'm calling it the 'HammerStone Articulated Loader' because my wife and I call our little hobby farm 'HammerStone Farm'. I'm a full-time software engineer, and I have always loved to make things. Buildings, furniture, long bows, machines, beer, complicated electronic systems, messes, whatever. My wife and 2 kids and I raise chickens and breed dairy goats; tend a garden; keep dogs, horses, and donkeys; make hay; heat with wood, etc. A loader like this would be a perfect addition to our other farm gear, and would ease some of the things that make this lifestyle harder than it needs to be (I'm not getting any younger).
So, I thought I'd introduce myself, the basic idea, and how I'm going to go about documenting it. I'm am still very much in the planning phase, and have many preliminary decisions left to make, which will be based on several factors, some of which will be dictated by the availability of scrap and donor parts I haven't even started looking for yet. But I have begun some 3D modelling on things that shouldn't change much and gotten the project infrastructure set up for documenting the plan, tracking progress, recording the results. I'm going to keep the bulk of that stuff on my own site, and link to it from here.
So to kick things off, here is the first
News Post related to the HammerStone Loader build. This links to a project on the project management site for my software company, parts of which I have opened up for read-only guest access (no login required). Feel free to browse around and see some of the
preliminary plans. I will probably use the News Feed there for simple progress updates, and then double-post by linking from here, because that gives me a historical summary of progress without commentary mixed in. When I have questions, need inspiration, or a discussion, I'll include pictures and other needed things here. I know this will probably be often, especially when dealing with some of the drive train and hydraulic designs and I look forward to benefiting from the generosity I've already seen on this board.
At the risk of repeating some things already written elsewhere, my basic idea is heavily inspired by the GatorS build, though that machine is a little too big for my needs. Like him, I started looking at the CadTrac, but that is a little too SMALL for my needs. So I'm shooting for something right in the middle (maybe I should call this the Goldilocks Loader!): a 5 ft wide machine, ruggedly built but not so heavy as to require lots of HP. Built just right to handle the things I need it for, and not more. Like I said, I have several preliminary things to decide before even this aspect is finalized, and I'll be asking questions regarding some of that stuff here soon, hopefully before the holidays.
As you can guess from my first paragraph, there are many, many things that will threaten to derail this project (some unforeseen), money probably being the biggest danger, and free time being next in line. As an example, I spent 3 days last week inside our outdoor wood furnace fixing some leaks that developed in the firebox. It always seems like something needs fixing. Plus there are a number of things I should get done before I start actually building this machine that will make the build go better. This is a very ambitious project for me and I fully anticipate that it will take me a couple years to get to a useful state. But my dad didn't raise a quitter, so if I can get started on it in earnest in the next 6 or 8 months without some major catastrophe hitting, I'll get it done eventually.
Thanks for being an open group of builders/makers. I look forward to learning whatever you're willing to share. And maybe I can reciprocate somehow, some day.
Danny
edit: PS. I forgot to mention that when you visit that site you'll get an HTTPS warning about the certificate. I just happen to have a self-generated cert, but you can safely ignore that and navigate through. I've been using that thing for a decade.
