[AT] Plowing snow

Dean Vinson dean at vinsonfarm.net
Thu Mar 5 17:25:19 PST 2015


Seems there's lots of us getting lots of practice this year.  I'm hoping to
be just about done for the season, but we'll see.  Folks a little bit
farther south than me just got another big wallop of snow (although none of
us here in Ohio are approaching the prodigious snowfalls that Ralph and
Steve and others have had to contend with).

I owned this place last winter but didn't yet live here, only visited every
couple of days, and my biggest piece of snowplowing equipment was my trusty
feed scoop shovel.  450-foot one-lane gravel driveway, lots of snow, not so
much fun.   This year has been cold but I don't think quite as snowy, and
I've got the green tractor and a rear blade which makes it way more fun
anyway.   No new snow today so after work I got the tractor out to move old
accumulated snow away from the west doors of my shop building; the floor
slab is right at grade level and actually slopes down into the building an
inch or two, and the snowmelt and runoff from our brief warm (45 degrees)
and rainy day this past Tuesday ran in and flooded the shop and the adjacent
garage.  No fun sloshing through nearly-frozen water when I'm trying to get
in the car to go to work in the morning.

Like Mike M and Spencer wrote, I typically pull the snow driving forward.  I
usually throw to the left since it's convenient for the route I've
developed--north out the driveway and then back in, then hard left turn just
in front of the north face of the shop/garage, plowing away from the
building.   If it was a heavy snow I make another round or two on the
driveway, either widening the plowed area or getting a little closer to the
gravel (hopefully without plowing too much of it into the grass); if it's a
light snow or if I don't have much time just the single out-and-back trip
will do.   

At first I tried always throwing to the east side of the driveway, since the
wind is almost always from the west and throwing to the west just builds up
a bank for the wind to drift back over the driveway, but I soon tired of
having to get down and change the angle of the blade at the end of every
pass and I wanted to keep plowing on both the out and back trips.   I was
also ending up with a mighty big windrow on the east side, which as others
have noted becomes difficult to move.   So lately I've just been throwing to
the west side on the trip out, and the east side on the trip back in, and
then going back periodically to clear up any drifting.  Only once has the
drifting caught me unawares, on an early morning drive to work when I hadn't
expected it to be cold enough or windy enough to drift much overnight, but
even then it wasn't bad enough to high-center the car.  (Been there, done
that, last winter and was glad to avoid it this time).

To really clear the area in front of the garage and the other barns, I've
taken to making a quick pass over the whole area throwing snow to one side,
and then going back for a second pass over everything in reverse with the
blade turned around backwards and perpendicular to the direction of travel,
pushing the snow straight like a bulldozer.   The area is of course way
shorter than the driveway, and way wider, and it's okay to just let snow
pile up at the far end.  I've been impressed by how much the blade will
push, the snow rolling up and over itself, and the green tractor sounds good
working.   Steve O's post about his 440C makes me want to get a crawler,
though... :)

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio






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