REGINA – Leon’s Manufacturing used the recent Farm Progress Show in Regina to introduce its award winning ASL front end loader design.
The loader received an AE50 award from the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, signifying it as one of the top 50 designs in the agricultural engineering world for this year.
“We’ve been working on front end loaders for as long as there’s been a Leon’s, about 50 years,” said Ken Lange, product development engineer with Leon’s.
“There’s been various attempts at self levelling over the past 10 or 15 years and we’ve gone through the mill just like everyone else has, with things that worked and things that didn’t work. Then we came up with what we’ve decided to call ASL – accurate self levelling.”
Read Also
VIDEO: Green Lightning and Nytro Ag win sustainability innovation award
Nytro Ag Corp and Green Lightning recieved an innovation award at Ag in Motion 2025 for the Green Lightning Nitrogen Machine, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into a plant-usable form.
Lange said with a typical farm loader that’s non-self levelling, as you lift it up, the bucket keeps coming back towards you. When you dump it at the top, it may have 45 degrees of dump and you have to shake it to get all the material to fall out.
The typical self-levelling loader works as a series of parallelograms. As the arms go up, the parallelograms push the bucket ahead a little bit, which makes it stay level.
“The bad part of it is that part of that parallelogram linkage was the bucket cylinder itself. As soon as you change the length of one side, it’s not a parallelogram any more. If you dump the bucket or roll it back, it changed the parallelogram and it didn’t work any more,” said Lange.
“The good thing about them was you could usually get lots of roll back at the bottom. They’d set them at about 30 degrees and they would stay there. The bad thing about them (was) at the top, you could only dump the bucket so far before it would crash into the loader itself.”
Lange said some manufacturers and farmers would try to get around the dumping issue by installing longer cylinders. But these could jam up so they’d install relief valves. It got to be a hydraulic hodge-podge.
“We went through all these steps, then came up with the ASL idea. The sneaky thing about it is that the cylinder is not part of the linkage. The cylinder is in its own carriage, connected to the bucket. You move (the loader) up and down, but you’re doing it with two fixed parallelograms, and you’re keeping the frame that the cylinder is connected to level. It always stays the same. It never changes,” he said.
“The bucket, or whatever attachment, pivots off that frame with the cylinder, totally independent of all the self-levelling linkage. The nice thing with that is you can get a lot of travel with it. We arbitrarily set them at 40 degrees roll back and 105 degrees of dump. So it dumps 90 degrees, which is straight down, then 15 degrees past that.”
Lange said with the separate bucket cylinder system, the loader dumps and rolls back at the top, or at the bottom, the same amount.
“Because you’re working with a fixed parallelogram you can be precise with, no matter where you set it, we find it to be accurate within a degree.
“The fact that the cylinder is not part of the parallel linkage, it’s on its own frame and you’re levelling the cylinder frame, is the patentable part. It gives better loader characteristics, more roll back, more dump, more angle and accuracy, than any self-levelling or non self-levelling loader.”
The smallest loader with the ASL system is the Leon model 705, for a 60 hp tractor. Loaders go up to the MM9005, designed for tractors up to 300 hp. The 9005 has a lift height of 177 inches and a lift capacity of 5,800 pounds up to maximum height.
Lange said this new loader uses a quick-attach system that’s a modified standard skid steer mount, so it will accept any skid steer attachment.
“You can get a snow bucket for a skid steer, or any other type of industrial attachment and use it on your farm loader. We had to modify the quick attach a bit, because a skid steer bucket never goes below ground level. But a farm loader can go below ground level. You can lift the front wheels off the ground with it,” said Lange.
He said they modified this mount system so the spring-loaded pins that hold the bucket in place won’t fall out when a farm loader uses it below ground level.
“… it’s an over centre locking system, so it locks itself in and out,” Lange said.
He expects the most common uses, especially in the larger ones, will be for bales.
“You always have that problem keeping bales from rolling down the arms and landing on you. Loading on trucks, it gets them positioned nicely. Guys doing dirt work and cleaning corrals, you can get some pretty big manure spreaders and you dump them pretty high up. Manure’s kind of sticky and it sometimes won’t fall out of the bucket. This one, it’s turned right upside down.”
