Magazine - Bunker Cultivator

By Eric Kulaas in Mechanics on 27th Nov 2009 12:00

We made this in 2003, trying to come up with a better mousetrap. It almost worked.

Years ago, cultivator2Green Machine was a dominant force in 2-cycle tools. That was back in the 80's when the Green Machine 3000SS was the hot commercial line trimmer and the 36" Bunton with the JLO was the hot mower. I guess that dates this.

In the late 80's they came out with the first split shaft system. You could get a stick edger, blower and line trimmer for a line trimmer. You could also get a cultivator. It was a bit on the heavy side but did a good job. It was a two arm job with both arms going back and forth under the soil. It was good in that it didn't throw any material around.

I found that John Deere had apparently bought them out and was selling the units with one of their split shafts. We had the line heads and cultivators. We found that when using them in the cultivator4bunkers they would leave some runners where the blades missed. So to try and over come that we modified them.

We took them apart and found we could press the arm off the crankshaft and re-press it on at the same angle as the other side. So instead of basically counter-rotating arms they rotated evenly. To get rid of the gap in the center we welded a piece of bedknife. They worked pretty well but somewhere along the line their use stopped.. Probably because their use was labour intensive and we just stopped keeping them that clean.






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