The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Monorail alternatives

6 wheel UTV

Thank you Roland for the driveway number crunching.

One of the outside the box alternatives to a monorail is a 6 wheeler.

The basic model is around 10k.

Not sure if it would do too much damage. More research is needed.



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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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These amphibious 6x6 machines come with significant compromises.

  • Looking at the specs, the only suspension is in the tires. Not surprising considering that you'd want to make as few holes as possible in the lower body shell.
  • The steering is done by differential braking or even reversing. That means it turns on a dime. But turning will tear up the soil.

The argo 6x6 750 HDi has 9.5 inches of ground clearance. That sounds like a lot. But how deep are the ruts in your driveway?

And even with one of these, you can still get stuck.

The main problem with your soil is that it's really soggy. So every time that you use an ATV or 6x6, you'll churn up the mud and the ruts will get deeper. In the end the mud will probably win, unless you keep dumping truckloads of gravel in your swamp.

Getting a 6x6 with the optional tracks might help. Those would help spread the load over more area.

A hovercraft doesn't tear up the soil and can traverse almost any terrain, but they're not all that great for hills. And they are notorious gas-guzzlers, and noisy.

Comment by Roland_Smith Mon Jul 4 17:16:53 2016
Cheapest way would be to mount a big winch at the house side and with lots of cable just pull the truck or wagon through the mud and water. Put a pulley on the other side and pull it back toward the road.
Comment by wewally Mon Jul 4 17:39:28 2016

Winch and a hovercraft. www.hovercraft.com has a variety of sizes, just delete the propulsion. Or rather than a winch, a rope tow, with a return pulley at the other side of the creek.

Or build a "barge" with large diameter inflatable rollers, and drag it across with a winch.

Or a sled?

Comment by Ryan R. Young Tue Jul 5 02:44:04 2016

What about a heavy duty pulley system? Something similar to what people use for clotheslines, but able to hold more weight, then you could hang a platform from it to put the straw bales, etc on it.

My mother has a pulley system for her bird feeders that probably holds a few hundred pounds when the feeder are all full (she's pretty serious about her birds); I'm not sure what your heaviest loads would be but at least a couple hundred pounds should be do-able.

Comment by Rae Tue Jul 5 21:28:31 2016





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