Box Scraper

Well, I finally ordered my six-foot box scraper from Northern Tool. I know there are a lot of companies I could have ordered it from, but I like Northern Tool, in part because I have an account there and don't have to type my address in every time!

Now here's the quasi-shameful sop to fashion: I really wanted a hinged-blade box scraper because I think they're more efficient in the long run, but I bought the fixed-blade box scraper because it was red and it matched my tractor! Criminy, next thing you know I'll be ordering red cowboy boots. (Realistically, I doubt I'll ever notice the difference in performance between a fixed-blade and hinged-blade box scraper, so why not get the red one?)

For what it's worth, let me plug for Northern Tool for just a moment. I'm not by any means a Northern Tool power shopper, but I've placed a few orders with them over the years and I've never had a complaint with them. I did have a complaint with some 12-volt utility lights I ordered, but the problem was with the manufacturer, not Northern Tool. At least I assume the problem was with the manufacturer. (Not to go too far afield here, but I found that the lights didn't work once I wired them up. Assuming I had a grounding problem, I hardwired the light directly across the terminals of a 12-volt battery just to make sure the lights worked. They didn't. I tested the lights with an ohmmeter and found a resistance that seemed to be in keeping with an intact filament - that is to say, it wasn't an open circuit - so I decided that maybe I was incorrect in assuming that the metal mount was the ground. So I hacksawed the back off one of the lights and verified that, indeed, the metal mount is the ground. But they still didn't work. So I got out my battery charger, which has a jump-starting mode, which works mainly by jacking up the output voltage by an awful lot (that's a technical term). I hooked the light up to the charger, flipped it to jump-start mode, and promptly smoked the filament. But at least it lit up, if only for a few hundred milliseconds. So I don't know what's up with the lights. And it doesn't matter.)

The point is that in six to ten days I'll have to figure out how to unload a 510-pound implement from the back of a delivery truck. My grampa used to have a handy gadget, a tripod made out of enormously long pieces of very heavy pipe with a chain hoist slung from the apex. It was homemade and of course nobody knew what its lifting capacity was, but I do know that it hefted some pretty heavy I-beams and dozer parts. I could use that tripod, I think. But lacking the tripod, I'm guessing that I'll make a platform out of bales of hay, chain the box scraper to the parked tractor, and have the truck driver drive out from under the scraper and let it land on the hay...

But I do wish I had that tripod.