We’ve had big plans for the Holder C 9.72H tractor we picked up a couple years ago. This 2002 vintage unit is less than 50 inches wide, allowing it to fit down the ORV Trails and with the 72 horse diesel, it has real tractor abilities. Steering is via center articulation, giving it exceptional prowess in sneaking through narrow trails. Four wheel drive with locking diffs (true all wheel drive) makes it surprisingly capable over various terrain. These machines were built for city sidewalk maintenance, not off-road, but most of the needed features are there. There are also limitations, such as no suspension and limited component protection. An enclosed cab with heat and AC make it an all-weather machine and keep our operators much happier when out grading for 8-12 hours at a crack.
The front mounted three point allows it to carry our articulating boom flail mower, which works great for brushing trails. It reduces ground clearance and sticks out a bit, so not good for the 50″ trails except in very limited circumstances, but does work great on our ORV Routes and Snowmobile trails.
That same three point allows our stump grinder to be transported to where it’s needed on the trail and put to work. This is the largest grinder that Quick Attach offered at the time (32″?) and can take on the largest of stumps we’ve encountered. We’ve removed hundreds of stumps ranging from 48″ monsters to 3″ sneakers that hide in the ferns waiting to grab the next quads front tire.
We built a compact blade for the front three point, allowing us to cut berms and other small tasks, like a mini-dozer but not lose any maneuverability to squeeze through the trails. Due to how close to the machine the blade is, it can be difficult to see what is being cut and pushed, but it takes just a bit of experience to judge things through the lower cab window.
The hydraulic dump box on the back can hold a couple yards of material when stacked right. Add our ATV-towable dump trailer and you have a mini gravel train for the 50″ trails. Dump the material, turn around and use the front blade to rough spread the material.
We built a drawn grader for the 50″ trails for it to pull. It’s based of a Land Pride land plane which was narrowed and other modifications to make it towable. A 36″ steel packing roller is integrated so that it can flatten the trails and pack the material. As of this writing, we’ve graded about 100 miles of ORV Trail and are very happy with the results. There are always things that can be improved and we expect more evolution to happen here as well.
Our latest tool add is a brush cutter, mounted on the front blade. It is a hydraulically driven reciprocating sickle bar which is good for lighter material, up to about 1″. The kind of brush/branches that grow into the trail from the sides. We had this unit from earlier as it is designed to attach to a loader bucket and trim back the brush on the bigger trails. It won’t handle the larger branches and was not as good of a fit for the bigger trails, unlike our flail mower or a circular blade unit, but it works great on the lighter trail-side stuff. We can manually angle the cut from vertical to horizontal. At full vertical, it can trim the random branch encountered when grading. When angled over it can cut new clear-cut re-growth back much easier than walking through with a weed-whacker with saw blade attachment. With steady cutting, it can collect trimmings on top of the front winch, but getting out every few minutes to clear that out by hand is a small price compared to having to walk and manually cut the same overgrown section.
Other doodads include air conditioning, hitch-mounted winch (for front and rear mounting) and limb risers/rub rails for when we have to lean into a tree or limb and also protect the mission-critical AC unit.