IH-1000 loader questions

Well I finaly have my IH-1000 loader frame home ready to install on my Farmall 100. It is missing the bucket and I have found a 4' bucket but have been considering making a 42" wide bucket instead. I am not sure what the cost will be but my thoughts were that it might be lighter and I would tend to not over load it since I am sure steering will be a problem. Any recomendations on bucket design or 4' vs 3'6" wide? Would 1/4" thick plate be good enough if I put a 3/8" thick cutting edge on it?
Does anyone have deminsions of a loader bucket they could send me? It doesn"t have to be the IH bucket I can put the mounting brackets where I need them when I build it. Any thoughts on this would be great!
Thanks
Chad
keep in mind the 4' bucket is like 6 hours away so just buying it isn't that easy.

What are you going to move with your bucket? Snow buckets hold more cubic feet than dirt and rock buckets. You want your bucket to be wider than your wheel base.

I personally would like to make a blade on the front for pushing dirt and snow but the blade would need to operate like a grader blade where I can change the forward angle and up and down angle. The forward angle and the length that sticks out to the side can probably set with pin holes but the up and down angle would have to be hydraulic for cutting ditches and slopes. Other than that, the up/down controls for buckets tend to float up or dig in and make it hard to get a level surface.

Thanks
I would also like to make a front blade for it instead of the bucket for snow, but then again I have never used a bucket for snow maybe I would like it. With no power steering I think a bucket as wide as the axle is way to big to heavy for the front end. I have no specific use for it other then odds and ends when they show up, some dirt moving mostly lifting or moving firewood from my wood pile to my boiler.
the uses I am sure are endless and I am sure once it is up and running I will dream up stuff all the time.

My 1000 loader came with the 28" manure tine bucket. Even with a tine cover it was pretty worthless.

I purchased a surplus 48" skidsteer bucket to replace it. I discovered that the lower mounting holes for the bucket were in the correct position for the 1000 loader, except they were too far apart.

To make it fit I had two options:

1. Cut off the left mounting brackets and re-weld them.
2. Section 10" out of the middle of the bucket.

In the end, I chose to section 10" out of the middle of the bucket because cutting off the mounting brackets was too messy and too much work.

Now I have a 38" bucket that covers the right-hand wheels of the tractor.

Frankly, due to the lack of down-pressure, the 1000 loader doesn't work well for plowing snow, at least on uneven surfaces. No down pressure means you can't keep the bucket from riding up over the snow. If you try to tilt the bucket forward, it submarines and digs up the ground underneath. A two-way lift cylinder would give the fine height control necessary for good pushing and digging performance.

I mostly use the loader to move bulky items and yard waste. Very rarely do I use it to dig, and then only in soft soil. It's not meant for heavy digging.

Hello M. My IH-3000 loader has the same symptons as the no down pressure you are talking about. Either rides up or digs in when I tilt the bucket. As far as I know, I've got up and down pressure cause I can raise the front wheels off the ground when I use the hoe.

Is there something I can do such as R & R the valve assembly or something? It has a float position on it which seems to work when back dragging or when I don't have the bucket tilted so the edge catches.

To make matters worse, when I try it with the bucket tilted all the way down so it acts like a blade, the left side seems to be a couple inches lower than the right. If I barely want to skim the surface, it only does it for part of the bucket width and then if I drop it down to get the right side to skim the top, the left side digs in. Is there a way to level the bucket up?

Thanks for any help.

The IH 1000 loader doesn't have down pressure on the lift cylinder.

It's pressure-up, gravity-down.

I rigged up a five foot snow plow (IH grader blade) and used it on my 1000 loader after taking the bucket off. I simply put a pipe through the loader arm holes and snow plow frame and attached a chain to the upper arm to lift the plow It actually worked great for snow, was wide enough and could be used to really lift the snow up high into a pile with the loader arm. The sideways push from the blade was a little tough in wet snow, but I used this set up for twenty years in New England winters.

Here is a picture of the snow plow on the 1000 loader