Here I am, pondering ordering machine tools (rather scaled back from my original plans), probably for delivery in late August / early September. I can get liftgate delivery service, for a price. But....
I'm pretty sure the delivery truck won't be coming up the long gravel driveway. We've had a couple of freight deliveries where we've had to transfer the cargo from the delivery truck to the pickup truck in the road. One of the drivers was even leery of coming out on the narrow country roads (they're not all that narrow).
So, I suspect the truck will stop in front of the driveway, blocking traffic in one direction, and I'll have to move the things myself. Fine; that's one reason I have a tractor with a loader and pallet forks. But, as I ponder what machinery to order, what's the weight limit?
This turns out to be rather a tricky question. The manuals are out in the barn, but, if memory serves, stated lift capability for the loader, with the load 0.5m out on the pallet forks and lifting to a height of 1m, is a bit shy of 800 pounds, which pretty well covers the things I can realistically set up in the garage with the help of a shop crane. But... there's also a warning against trying to carry more than some much lesser limit - said limit being, I think, under 400 pounds, which is decidedly limiting. Then there are numbers relating to loader capacity with various sorts of ballast hung off the 3-point hitch, without an explanation as to those numbers refer to the additional capacity or the total capacity with the ballast in place.
The safe load presumably depends on the lift height and on the terrain along the route. Intended lift height is "just barely clearing the ground", while the route is basically straight up the driveway, which isn't all that steep and has minimal side-to-side slope.
Oh, well. I guess this calls for further contemplation of the manual, and maybe checking out various fora or even calling the dealer.
... OK, it's not dark yet, so I fetched in the manuals. Lift capacity (500mm forward, 1500mm height) is 868 pounds, this presumably being the maximum weight the mechanism is capable of lifting to that height. But, rated pallet fork capacity (from the yellow section) is only 390 pounds, with dire warnings about rollovers - and nothing about location of the load nor lift height. And, I guess the rear ballast numbers are the approximate weight of the ballast, not anything to do with the safe load. And then I don't know the weight of the pallet fork assembly (which I guess I could look up). OK, back out to the barn: says 240 pounds on the pallet-fork nameplate; most of that is close in and/or low down. So... probably... for roughly 500mm lift height... looking at the lift weight vs. height curve, gross lift capacity to 500mm height is somewhere north of 1200 pounds without running out of hydraulic force and presumably without breaking anything. Question is, how much can it lift without the tractor falling on its nose, assuming I hang the tiller off the back? (And, with a suitable counterweight, how much load can I put on the front axle without breaking anything? A quick look at the tractor manual offers no clues.)
Who would have thought I'd be trying to do weight and balance calculations for a freakin' tractor, without benefit of having the actual formulæ in front of me? Guess I gotta do some geometry stuff.
Oh, and it looks like the "390 pounds" rating may be from the label on the official Kubota pallet forks, which isn't what I have, so I don't really know how it relates to anything.
Afterthought: When I removed a bunch of wooden posts from the beyond-the-orchard area, and transported them over to the barn on the pallet forks (suboptimally distributed, from a balance perspective), hmmm... there were about 15 of them, at, I think, around 35 pounds each, so... bit north of 500 pounds? Anyway, keeping the loader fairly low to the ground, and driving very carefully over the irregular terrain, I didn't get into any kind of trouble. That kind of gives me a reference point.
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