Two holer hay trailer build

I made one of these,
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That I’m going to attach like so.
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Gbkeith said:
I am honestly not sure yet which bale I’ll dump first. Sometimes I’m going to have one on the truck and two on the trailer. I made the trailer itself to be pretty tongue heavy and put the racks so that with two equally sized bales 12% of their weight is on the hitch. Depending on what else I do it should still have 100 pounds of tongue weight with a 1500 pound bale on the back and nothing on the front. It shouldn’t matter which one I dump first for dragging it across a pasture with an f350. And hopefully with two bales it’s stable enough my mom can pull it down the road with her f150, or maybe even her bus.
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Man that would really surprise me if that's the case.
Math is math though so you're probably dead on.
 
CarterKraft said:
Man that would really surprise me if that's the case.
Math is math though so you're probably dead on.
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What you had no way of knowing was that I’m going to locate the spare tire and the tool box either right in the middle or all the way in the front to make it that way.
 
I’m thinking real hard about cutting the cradle mounts off and redoing it four or five inches shorter. I don’t know what four or five inches is in dirt guy measurements. For concrete guys, those are the big lines next to quatro and cinco. But that gets everything lower and more stable, gets it out of the wind just a little bit, and makes everything a little stronger and less subject to leverage. Even makes it a few pounds lighter. I’m not sure that it’s worth going to the trouble of changing at this point though. I hate going backwards. Right now I’m 60-40 going to re-do it though.

I wasn’t sure how well the rear bale would roll over the tire. So I played with it and came up with a number where I knew it would work, then added a couple inches. Now that I’ve done it, I think it would roll over that tire just fine if it was lower.
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Right there it would have unloaded just fine. Edward is about 5’4”. The bale on the trailer is about two inches higher than when I haul one on the back of the pickup. I dunno. I’ll sleep on it.
 
It was bugging me so I came out to look. Unless something changes I’m going to tack something on to use as a track and just cut four inches out with a circular saw, clean it up and put it back on. Shouldn’t take that long and everything about it is a little better. Do a good enough job and in sixty years my nephew or my daughter will tell their grandkids about how pickups used to burn diesel and I built that trailer back in the day, all while Wall-E is backing the self driving electric F350 up to hitch it up.
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For my latch I’m thinking about getting a couple of the little baby 1/4” ratchet binders, cutting the hooks off, and pinning the rods onto the ends. Doing that means even parked out of level my mom or daughter could still have enough mechanical advantage to lock and unlock everything. I need to look at one and see how far you have to work the handle to get an inch of stroke at both ends.
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I'd try and make something that you can only actuate from the end so that some dimwit farm hand doesn't drop a bale on themselves.
 
Maybe have this triangular piece hinge either toward the middle or down flat at the blue dot. Pull it toward the rear and it dumps.

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I assume you have looked at other bale wagon setups. When we were doing round bales, we had a 7 bale wagon that dumped off to the passenger side. It has like a 5 foot bar that you can unfold and lift to help it dump. There is also a simple latch to hold it down. I’ll try to find some time to go get a picture of it. When we quit baling, the neighbor bought it and I started raking for him. I didn’t know part of the job description was doing square bales too.

This looks like it works pretty good for being home built.
 
_stucky said:
I assume you have looked at other bale wagon setups. When we were doing round bales, we had a 7 bale wagon that dumped off to the passenger side. It has like a 5 foot bar that you can unfold and lift to help it dump. There is also a simple latch to hold it down. I’ll try to find some time to go get a picture of it. When we quit baling, the neighbor bought it and I started raking for him. I didn’t know part of the job description was doing square bales too.

This looks like it works pretty good for being home built.
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We’ve had a big two row trailer from Kansas for about ten years. I thought about copying the mechanism on it but decided that was extravagant for two bales.
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A few comments, that crane seems overkill for loading hay bales in the yard. Your trailer has more metal in it than that 10 bale trailer. You should go full bore and put a couple of electric linear actuators and ring up a blue tooth remote so you can drop bales from the warmth of the truck. You just need someone to be there to cut the strings off for you.
 
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