Editor’s Note: Finding ways to make golf course maintenance more efficient has always been a goal of superintendents and the USGA Green Section. Better practices, improved grasses and new technology have all played a role in helping golf course maintenance to continually become more efficient and effective. Even with all the progress that has been made, the high cost of bunker maintenance remains a significant challenge to this day. Increasing standards for bunker playability seem to always be one step ahead of gains in efficiency. The use of small and highly maneuverable mechanized bunker rakes has become commonplace on today’s courses and helps to save countless staff hours when compared to hand raking. However, the earliest versions of mechanical bunker rakes where not quite as nimble, as is shown in this 1954 article published in USGA Journal and Turf Management. This article paints a familiar picture of technology being slow to reach the golf course maintenance market and superintendents devising their own innovative solutions to problems that industry hasn’t yet addressed.
Stretching man hours on a golf course is an old, familiar problem to the golf course superintendent. The development of mechanized equipment has been lagging far behind present-day requirements because golf course maintenance is a specialized field and manufacturers do not have sufficient potential sales in this field to encourage the production of labor-saving devices.
Hence, in the maintenance of golf courses, the superintendent is obliged to adapt multi-purpose machinery or to build his own in order to make the best use of the limited labor available. Numerous and varied mechanical devices have been designed in the golf workshop which, in some measure, would reduce the man hours necessary to do certain jobs.
The mechanical bunker raker shown in the illustration was designed for the Tamarack Country Club in Greenwich, Conn. Bunkers there range in size from small to very large, and contours range from shallow and flat to deep and steeply banked.
This device not only has met all requirements but also it has done a better and neater job than hand raking and it has done it in less than half the time.
The gadget is as simple to make as it looks in the photograph. A 15-foot section of 5-foot chain-link fence is fastened to a piece of 1.5-inch ordinary galvanized water pipe of the same length. This assembly is then fastened in turn with removable clamps, to angle brackets bolted to a regular golf course tractor and can be removed easily when not in use.
In order to remove tire marks from the sand, a drag chain of sufficient length to loop behind the raking attachment should be used. The chains used here are two medium weight tow chains fastened end to end; the outer ends are fastened to a light-weight 0.5-inch or 0.75-inch crossrod which keeps the chain-link wire from buckling and also supports the drag chain. A heavy chain should not be used as it tends to drag the sand up and over the lip of the bunker.
Care should be exercised in determining the height at which the assembly is anchored to the tractor so that the twisted ends of the chain-link wire drag in the sand at the right pressure and so that the effect is one of continuous light furrows, such as might be obtained with a hand rake. It should be noted that a dual-tired tractor has been used which supplies all the necessary power and with less tracking or depressing of the sand than might occur with a single rear-tired tractor.
Bunkers at Tamarack range in size from as small as 100 square feet to as large as one-quarter of an acre, with a total area of all bunkers approximately 90,000 square feet. There has been no difficulty in accomplishing the entire operation with one man and a tractor in a half day with this attachment.
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