BROADVIEW, Sask. – After using his 38-foot, 1,200-bushel grain trailer for 12 years, Dale Richter said it was starting to rust out and wasn’t roadworthy for the highway.
He bought a new trailer, but hung on to the old one. After seeing some farmers pulling pup trailers behind a tractor, he started thinking.
“I had this old trailer sitting here and a local garage had a homemade converter dolly. It was supposed to be pulled by a tandem truck and it had a box mounted on it. But there were some errors made when it was being built and they couldn’t use it on the highway,” said Richter.
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“It was made from scratch. But the mounts for the springs were welded on the side of the frame and that’s not allowed … . It’s got to be mounted right underneath the frame.”
He bought the converter dolly for a reasonable price, put it under the old trailer and pulls it around with his big tractor.
Richter welded up anything that was cracked or rusted through on his trailer. To pull it with the tractor, he has to back off the air brakes. The brakes on the tractor can manage fine.
“It’s a big enough tractor that it can handle it.”
The converter has eight standard semi wheels, as does the trailer. With highway tires instead of the flotation ones commonly found on grain carts, it can cause some soil compaction.
“It goes through the field pretty good, but it’s got a 350 hp tractor pulling it. If you’re going up some hills at 15 mph, it makes the tractor snort.”
While Richter pulls the trailer in the field with his tractor, he said it isn’t actually used like a typical grain cart. He doesn’t drive around the field and take grain on the fly.
“Most of the time (we use it) for surge capacity. We’ll park it at one end of the field if we’re harvesting some longer fields. We always like dumping on the headlands, so if you can’t get back to the other end, you can have this trailer sitting at the one end, dump a quarter of a hopper off so you can get back to the other end and dump in the main trailer.
“At night, if the truckers are getting tired, they can head off earlier and the harvesters can keep going another hour or two.
“A lot of times we’ll set an auger up on the surge tank and you can auger onto the main semi. Or, once it’s full, we’ll bring it home with the tractor and dump into a bin, too.”
