Yup, this helps. What do you mean by....

Your Ford sounds like the early ford backhoe tractors with industrial loaders. So those arms are made from 1/4 inch thick steel.

When you say your celtrac had 1/2 inch solid arms, you mean the arms were torched from 1/2 inch plate right?

The henry loader sounds more like your ford loader. Early industrial loader. The book says that these loaders were good for 3000 to 3200 pounds lift to 9 feet with about 4500 pound break out force. Now this is a useful loader.

After looking at the Great Bend loaders, esp. the ones for mid size tractors, I came away thinking that these are a bit light or forgive me, a bit cheesy.

I wonder what the case loaders have for thickness in their arms?

I am using this book and its few limited pictures as a guideline for designing and building mine. Not having seen one in person and not having the engineering drawings, it makes things a little harder to visualize.

The tapered box beams are cool but they take extra effort to make if you dont have the equipment to form them. They can be made by resawing structual steel elements on a large bandsaw such as a grob or doall but this is time consuming and tedious. I have reserved myself to doing this but I need to have some idea of how thick to make these elements, hence my questions. This also takes many hours of arc and TIG welding and grinding to get these beams just right and strong enough.

In looking at the current generation of Great Bend loaders, I have to say that I am disappointed. If you look at the loader on a modern Case backhoe, *THAT* is a loader! The others are gas powered tonka toys. I understand why they need to be made light weight but I need to go the other way.

The TS-1000 loader is listed at weighing in at 1652 pounds minus the bucket. The 60 inch bucket weighs an extra 520 pounds.

So this gives you an idea of where I am comming from. What are the dimensions on the arms of your industrial loader? What about the pillars? How big are they and what is the gage of steel used to make them?

The design also looks streamlined and the word I used to describe it cannot be used on this forum. But it the loader does look good.

Thanks in advance...
Dev