Kubota X900 update
We've used the Kubota X900
twice now and it continues to exceed our expectations.
I'm thinking of deleting the
wire mesh barrier between the dump bed and the seats to make hauling
lumber easier.
Those two 2x4's sticking out
hit something solid and busted a bungee cord and if the mesh barrier
was gone I could have strapped them onto the front roll bar.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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You're right Marco, we could strap some lumber up high like that.
A trailer might be an option for us after we do a few more loads of rock.
Chris....I'll bet you're right about whiplash protection....I got up to 4 mph on a rare straight away by the chicken coop but other than that we will most likely never drive much faster.
The barrier could be there for several reasons;
Whiplash protection seems unlikely to me. A higher seat with head-rest would seem a better solution in such a case. And what are the chances of having a high-speed rear-end collision in a vehicle that is presumably not road-legal?
In cases 1 or 2 I would expect the screen to be non-removable (e.g. welded in place). But I think it's removable; there is an option to have a completely enclosed cabin with a roof and windows all around.
So just like the roll-cage and safety belts, the mesh barrier is probably there for reason 3; to prevent a worst-case scenario. I'd leave it in place. It's not that the chances of this happening are high, it's that the consequences can be so dire when it does.
In engineering it is customary to to a Failure Mode and Effect Analysis ("FMEA"). This means thinking up a list of things that could go wrong (failures) during the operation of the machine/vehicle. For each failure you estimate the chance of it happening on e.g. a scale of 1 to 5 (where 5 is a certainty) and the severity of the consequences when it does on a scale of e.q. 1 to 10 (where 10 is probably loss of life). The issues where the product of chance times severity are higher than a certain threshold need to be solved/mitigated before a machine is allowed to go into production.
The roll cage is there to prevent the vehicle from crushing you in case the vehicle rolls over. But note that if you're not wearing the seat belt, you could fall out and then get crushed by the roll cage, which is not an improvement. This is a well-known problem with e.g. forklifts which are relatively easy to tip over when making a high-speed turn.