[AT] Plowing snow

Stephen Offiler soffiler at gmail.com
Fri Mar 6 06:45:21 PST 2015


Dean, yes, you need a crawler!

Here's a very brief 10-second video of my wife acting silly on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c6w8k_nODs

Here's a 45-second video shot after our big blizzard at the end of January
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVJtdiCLhvE

Here's a 3-minute video of me fooling around in the snow when I first got
the machine up and running about 2 years ago.  It's not tuned perfectly
here yet, and you may notice I haven't even had time to re-install the
sheetmetal yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Guv4Q7Kv4IE

SO



On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 8:25 PM, Dean Vinson <dean at vinsonfarm.net> wrote:

> 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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