Very close to a working machine. Quit late today just short of bleeding all the hydraulics. Will do that tomorrow or Monday.
Work on a real gear driven blade circle is underway in parallel. This version has a manual angle blade--pull the pin, rotate the blade, put pin back in. I have a ring gear from a Cummins 8.3 that I plan to mount to the perimeter of a metal disk and drive it with a hydraulic motor to rotate the blade. I have an additional spool valve for that purpose. I might even be able to use the Cub Cadet's original spool valve to tilt the blade (to dig more or scrape more). Building that will take some time but will retrofit on to the existing traction frame and use the same blade.
Here are some pics from today. Blade is skewed all the way to the right in these pictures.
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