I bought a 3-point quick hitch. The one I bought is a Speeco product, made for cat 1 tractors and doesn’t need bushings on the pins to make them fit the hitch. It went on in about 5 minutes, easy-peasy. It’s kind of awkward to do by yourself, but if you do one draft link at a time it’s not too bad.
One of the downsides with a quick hitch is that older implements won’t always fit without some modifications. In my case, the implements I have are fairly new and are all quick hitch compatible so I should be good to go.
Also, if you have a posthole auger, it won’t work with the quick hitch since the top link is removed when you hitch up the auger.
After checking everything over, I tried hitching up the implements I have – a King Kutter box blade and a Land Pride RCR1260 bush hog. The box blade hitched up the first time, zero issues. The bush hog was another story. To get it to hitch up, the top hook needed to be angled further away from the tractor, once I figured that out it hitched up just fine. Connecting the PTO shaft is a little less convenient, but still doable without too much cursing. One good thing is that the same vertical position of the top hook works for the bush hog and the box blade, so no need to move the top hook when switching implements. I did remove the slow vehicle reflector, because it made reaching the lock handles harder than it needs to be.
It would be nice to find some pins to use in place of the bolts for the top hook. That way you could make adjustments to the height of the hook without tools. I think a 1/2″ pin would work. I may pick up a couple of pins for trailer hitches and see if they will fit.
So far, I like the quick hitch better than the Pats Easy Change links. I’ll need more time with it and more hitching/unhitching to make a final determination.