Here is an effective 2 HP stump puller you can easily make yourself. Quite the ingenious solution! I know in 1800 when land was started to be cleared on our farm they used a screw type arrangement that horses were hitched too and it pulled it out of the ground well enough, but this is a different take on it.
Somehow I don't think that I could do that with my Quad that has more horsepower! It is amazing what the older generations did with a little ingenuity! I can remember my Grandpa telling me how they broke up big rocks by building a fire around them for a couple of days then throwing water on them. Gary
I hear ya. As you know we have been here quite awhile and one thing that is interesting is to know the history. My Great Uncle many times removed told of a story in 1838 where "him and his chum brother cleared a 10 acre field and burned the bush in one summer." Now that is quite the feat with oxen and an axe. (Cross cut saws were not invented until 1897). Myself, I got chainsaws and a bulldozer and I know I can't do the same thing. But a few years ago after clearing a 12 acre forest that was once field (as evidenced by rock walls). Rock walls are great because they tell you a lot. In New England the vast majority were built between 1830-1850 and if their rocks are just big ones, it was probably just pasture, but if it included big, medium and small, it was probably tilled for crops. Anyway in the center of this field was a boulder of slate. It was 5 feet high, 10 feet wide and about five feet through. I know that because the John Deere 850c had a blade that size and the rock took all of it. So in 2014 I finally cleared the field my ancestors could not, but it took me 185 horses to do it! On another rock, it took a dozer and excavator working in tandem to not only get it out of the hole, but push it across the field. Under it was the most beautiful loam ever. It was apparent what they did; unable to move it via oxen, they had dug a hole and rolled the rock into it until it was just below plow depth. Over 150 years it worked upward though from frost action!
LodgedTree, Great video, thanks for sharing it. My old neighbor has Belgium's. They are very nice animals. He would pasture them right next to my fence line . Great memories watching them each morning.
Nice video. It reminded me of the work I used to see done with my grandfather and his horses. He did all kinds of stuff with just 2 "horsepower". My uncle was always one for having plenty of power so he used 4 horsepower to do anything you might imagine including all planting and harvest tasks along with moving enough hay for his horses and the dairy cattle he kept. He even used the horses to run the equipment for his silage operation. It took both teams to run everything on a 500 acre mostly dairy farm. I remember well a year when I worked with him and my cousins to harvest about 20 acres of potatoes.
I find a lot of interesting stuff from the old days on our farm. Typically I'll be digging around an old rock wall and find spare disc harrow parts, plow points, and potato bed chains. I even dug up two intact, new steel implement wheels that were lying on an old rock wall once. It was an old spot for spare parts and I have since dug up a ton of new [arts, now rusted from 100 years of sitting there and being covered over with tons of leaves. I never was a horse guy. My Grandfather hated horses, but loved tractors and gave me that itch, while my Great-Grandfather loved horses instead. Growing up we had an old John Deere 1010 bulldozer which is why to this day I have an out of control bulldozer fetish. Bulldozers have fallen out of favor with skid steers and excavators taking over, but I still love them and what they do. My biggest interest is doing big tasks like forestry with smaller equipment. Yes it might be yarding a stump out with two horses and a lever, but also small feller-bunchers that go on tractors. I know they have massive equipment that does more, faster, better; but it also has the price tag. Being able to look at a home-made feller buncher that goes on a tractor...I'll see pictures and think,'I could build that for my bulldozer.' I like that instead of, "IF I win the lottery I'd buy a feller buncher." Not much ingenuity in that!
