The follow-up to dumping piles of dirt in the far paddock was tracking down a second-hand grader blade to level it all out.

Second-hand because its cheaper, but also because the build quality in the older equipment was of a higher standard. On any given day there's maybe 20-30 such items listed on Facebook Marketplace. I do look at Gumtree as well, but don't find much that I want there normally.

So, for a few weeks I was checking every couple of days to see what was on offer. By looking for a little while I get to see the variations in design and have a think about features that I need. A basic grader blade has a short body with a flat blade of heavy steel that is used to flatten and smooth out surfaces. Or maybe it has a lighter metal sacrificial blade that wears out but is designed to be replaced. Newer ones the blade is often fixed in a squared position. Better ones have a circular fitting at the apex, that allows you to modify the sweep angle of the blade. Or the tilt angle. Useful for road grading. And maybe a jockey wheel to keep the blade at a specific height above the ground.

In the end I started looking for a long blade. That is, a long body, not actually a long blade. The idea being, with a long draft I could back up to a big pile and drop the blade over the pile onto the other side and drag it through. I figured that's what I needed for levelling lots of big piles of earth.

And price was a factor, of course. In the end I found two that were the same manufacture, both about the same distance away (an hour and a half). One was rusty and unused for a long time, the other one had been cleaned up for sale, repainted, and was half the price. Very heavy gauged iron in the making of it, probably 200-300 kg.

I took the new, big tipping trailer, with plans about how to get it on and off. The seller said he could forklift it on for me, but getting it off at this end without a forklift was a different issue.

It turned out to be a difficult load, in that it was too wide to go into my huge trailer. The wideness we sorted by changing the orientation of the blade from a basic 90 degrees to an acute angle. (Which took 20 minutes, loosening gigantic bolts holding the blade in position.) But that made it longer, more than 2.4 metres in length, which is longer than my trailer. We dealt with that by dropping the tailgate, chaining it at a horizontal angle that added an extra 40 cm to the length of the trailer. It almost worked.....

We were 2 km down a very bumpy road and there was an ominous "Bang!" from the trailer. We stopped and sorted out a bit of a headscratcher. The sheet weight of it had stretched the trucking strap ties allowing it to creep over the edge of the tailgate. (t couldn't fall off as the trailer mesh gate was closed and would hold it in, but I really didn't like the weight hanging over the edge. So, we manhandled it back up and into the trailer, REALLY tied it down tight, and took off again. A sweaty hour and a half later we got back home.

At this end I had set up a couple of hay bales to catch the weight of the blade. I hammered an anchoring star-picket into the ground, untied all the strapping holding it in the trailer, then tied the trucking strap to the blade and the star-picket. Back into the car and drive off, very slowly. The blade came out of the trailer, dropped onto the hay bale, then slowly dropped the tail end to the ground. Very painless....except for some new dents in my trailer. Just the bouncing on the road had caused some dents in my solid checker-plate trailer floor. Heavy!

My little Iseki is only 21 horsepower, so I was a bit twitchy that the blade might be too heavy, but it all hitched up and lifted fine.

Very steep learning curve. It turns out there is a whole different way of driving with a long grade blade attached to a small tractor. This issue was that my tractor is relatively short. The blade unit is twice that length. So when you are driving backwards approaching a dirt pile, it isn't really the height the blade is hydraulically lifted to ( which I can control) which is the main element that controls the overall height of the blade in the grading process. Its the relative height of the front wheels versus the end of the blade. That is, if my front wheels are in a small pothole (and there's lots of them in that paddock) the sheer length of it all means the blade is substantially higher in the air than I was expecting. As I move on and come out of the pothole the blade swings in a huge arc. There's probably a great final trigonometry exam question in it. Live, with heavy metal swinging wildly in the air, its all a bit scary!

In the end some piles were relatively easy to spread, Others, depending on the landscape, were more problematic. Those I graded as best I could and have been going back with a shovel and rake and finishing it the hard way.

What was unexpected, sort of, was that there was a lot of rock in the piles. Not broken rock or waste concrete, just the normal, polished, rounded river stones you find in soil in these river flat paddocks. The process of grading it into piles and then us scooping, moving and dumping it tend to bring the rocks to the surface, so manually raking it required a lot of moving stones. I still haven't finished that and will picking up stones for a long time.

Once the piles were raked out relatively flat I have reseeded them with grass, mulched them with autumn leaves and lawnmower clippings.

This week we finally got some rain, so it will be interesting to see what happens next.