[AT] Plowing snow

[Gunnells, Bradley R]

Great videos Steve!

My grandfather had one of those old JD crawlers and I played on it many times sitting in the barn when I was a kid. So they have a special place in my heart. I’ve always wanted one but $$ always seems to come into play. Maybe some day….but darn…those videos fueled that passion again.  ;-)

Brad

> On Mar 6, 2015, at 8:45 AM, Stephen Offiler <soffiler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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