Sunday, January 2, 2011

Building my own cab for my tractor

Last year I added a snowblower to my Kubota B2710 tractor. Its a good thing it wasn't a heavy snow winter because I tired of the snow blowing into my face no matter which way I pointed the chute. The ski mask helped, but I would rather not finish the driveway and have a half-inch of powdered snow caked on me.

This year is turning out the same, and I finally decided to get a cab so I could blow snow and remain relatively comfortable. Cabs cost from $2,000 to $4,000 for a soft cab. Hard cabs probably are more. I didn't even look. I decided to build one myself.

I saw some threads about building on the TractorByNet.com forum. All were pretty nice. One, particularly intriguing, was built with plastic pipe. I looked around the shop. No plastic pipe, but a bunch of wood. That's how I picked the material to use.

Some of those shown on the forum looked quite professionally done. From the outset I didn't think mine would look professionally done. I will settle for just getting me out of the wind, and I am sure after I am done there will be a lot of things I will want to change, or to have done differently. What I didn't want to do was drill any holes in the roll bar or in the support bar that is part of the front end loader. I used both of those pieces of original equipment to mount the frame, without drilling either of them.

I designed on the fly, and the cab has taken me more time than I like, but it will be worth it. Now that I have mostly built it, I know how I could have made it go much, much faster.

Here's the skeleton. I'll post other pictures as I progress and I'll offer some rough measurements.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's the same tractor I have (B2710 w/ loader, rear snowblower).

Any further pictures and measurements available?

Tony Zona said...

Hi, Walter,

I have a few more and will be posting them in the next few days as I make some progress.