Simon the jobler: A Landscape Rake

I have a lot of trees on my property. Hundreds of little branches litter the ground in the spring. That, and I do not pick up my grass clippings when I mow the lawn which, over the years, have thatched the lawn. I once raked the whole place by hand and it is a tedious process that takes a whole weekend to accomplish. There is such a thing as a landscape rake that you can pull with your lawn tractor but they want three to six hundred dollars for it depending where you intend to buy. Considering I paid two hundred for the whole tractor... I decided to make a rake. The eureka moment happened when I came upon a box of disused store display hooks, perfect for the rake tines!

I started the process by making an axle out of a piece of 1/2" steel pipe and a couple of wheels I'd been keeping in the barn for such a project.

You can see the little red bracket on the axle... I was trying to figure out how to make the whole thing work. What I wanted was a modular system where I could reuse the axle and hitch for other implements if the need ever arose. The solution in the end was quite simple. I bored out a couple of cast iron tees for a slip fit on the axle. This accomplishes two things: 1) it allows the rake head to swing up and down to follow the contours of the terrain and 2) it allows me to take the whole rake head off the axle and hitch if ever I need it to.

Once that was figured out it was a simple matter of making a hitch and populating the rake head with tines. In this next photo you can see most of the parts. I kept making the parts out of steel and cast iron plumbing pieces because they're cheap, easy to work and I had most of what I needed on hand.

Here it is assembled and painted. The wooden piece and rope allow me to tilt the rake head to empty it without having to get down from the tractor. When it is actually working the wooden piece is straight up. After a test run the rake works really well but it tends to bounce a bit if I'm going too fast. I'll either put some weight on the rake head or devise some sort of spring loading so the tines really follow the contour.