One day while driving around the farms in Woodland, Washington, Perry spotted a New Idea power unit that had been used for picking sweet corn. He mentioned it to Mel, and they began to search for similar unit that would be available for purchase.
Before long Mel and Perry had located a New Idea 803C UNI power unit with a Cummins engine that was up for sale in Iowa. They checked it out and decided that it would do the trick for the first prototype.
With that settled Perry got busy in his shop in Amboy, Washington, fabricating the frame of the rock picker. Mel and Perry built the internals of the machinery using common off-the-shelf parts, knowing that they wouldn’t regret it when doing maintenance down the road. As the project progressed, Perry built while Mel critiqued his work.
The entire prototype was assembled in the state of Washington, and the two took it out to a field to see what it would do.
the story behind ...
... begins with a stoney field.
"I would have bought this machine
if I could have, but I couldn't find
anything like it ... so I built it."
-Mel Aho, Creator of the RP1000
They had to make a few adjustments on the calculations for the hydraulics and so on, but they knew immediately that they had achieved a superior rock picker to anything that was available on the market. The RP1000 had now been born.
Mission Accomplished
When it came time to transport the RP1000 to his farm in Minnesota, Mel knew that the real test for the machine would be to put it to work on one particular 18-acre parcel that others had written off as having so many rocks that it would never be farmed effectively. A single pass yielded 18 loads of rock, with each dump running between 10-12 yards of material. On average, the machine was able to cover one acre every 20 minutes.
2010 BizTek, Inc.