I just want to clarify my opinion:. In talking about tongue weight I mean putting the ball weight out at the end of the blade bracket and asking the midlift to lift against all that torque.
So if you want a hitch ball that can be raised and lowered where you could theoretically not have to get out of the seat, I still think you need to look at a sleeve hitch minimum or a 3-point hitch ideally.
One of the first things I ever fabricated was a 48-in wide horizontal plate with two vertical end plates that hinged to the top outer corners of my front blade, so that the blade can act as a clamshell bucket, something like a Johnny bucket.
So you put the blade down drive into dirt it scoops up onto/into the bucket, lift it up drive it to where you want it and then pull the horizontal plate forward, which opens the clamshell, and it dumps the dirt.
And it did work, somewhat. But it was very frustrating to use, because the mid lift was right at it's very very peak limits trying to lift it.
And I spent a lot of time trying to reimagine the engineering of it of how I could get the mid lift to lift it higher and lift it stronger and eventually I gave up on the idea of using the blade bracket as a lifting device, and just went ahead and built a real front loader.
So you certainly could replace the horizontal blade bracket with a custom fitting that would mount the ball closer to the grill, and could be made to go up and down using the mid lift. But if it were me, if I were going to do that much fabrication work, I would direct it into a rear hitch so that that fab work also brought all the other benefits of having a rear hitch.
But a stationary front ball mounted up tight near the grill seems like it would and does work great.
Bob
