Converting a Snowblower to front mount (help)

[dourobob]

Hi Jim
Good to see you on the TBN board. I'm not fully recovered from the eye surgery yet but making steady progress.

Thanks for the link - interesting idea. I have see the "drag along" type and I'm not sure if I could get into the areas around the house with the set up - I'll do some more thinking on that.

Bob

 

[dieseltoys]

Hi Bob, thanks very much on the comment. Well to answer your questions I did this conversion about ten years ago, at the time I think I spent around $1000 cdn for everything. The pump and hyd motors I sourced through the Surplus center: I have their recent catalog but unfortunately the identical components are no longer listed as their inventory is constantly changing. I think Rick had some estimated prices in his post for some of the components which looked pretty close, all depends how much time you want to spend researching and shopping around. Northern tool and equipment in Minnisota or Princess Auto in Canada are good sources for hydralic stuff too.
There was some machining involved to make up the coupler between the motor and fan input shaft and the stub shaft off the front of the engine to drive the pump which I was able to do myself as I have access to this type of equipment. I would say I had at least 30 hours of shop time in on this due to some of the engineering involved, it might have been more if I factor in the research and running for parts.
As far as weight disribution the tank being offset was not even noticeable although the unit was probably about as heavy as a loader bucket full of dirt. Not much of a concern if you have 4wd and power steering, unfortunately mine didn't have the latter and it was a little awkward in tight areas but the rear brakes always helped with that. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
If I did it again the only thing that would have been nice was some sort of quick attach system to switch between the loader buckets and mounting the blower as the pins were a bit of a pain to line up sometimes. The switch between bucket and blower would take about 15-20 minutes once I had it all perfected. But the improvement in usefulness and performance having the blower up front was well worth the effort, the only thing that would beat it was a hydro driven machine and a direct drive front mount unit, which incidently is what I upgraded to eventually.
Another note, if your machine has a live pto I would probably opt for a rear pto pump and maybe the resevoir in the rear too unless you want to mount a rear blade. (I did prefer to have my rear blade on to be able to push and scrape if I needed to) It's also important to run large enough hoses to handle the flow volume. My only concern in your case it that you do have a larger machine and will have to get a pretty large pump and motor, at least 30 gpm to transfer enough power and a fairly large resevoir or some type of oil cooler. Hope this all helps.

Steve

 

[RobertN]

I think I found a possible solution, which is bolt on for the most part. In my previous repoly, I mentioned setting it up with a hydraulic motor, and using a skid steer typ disconnect for the snow blower and your loader bucket.

Well, somebody has one available. It is made so you can put a 3pt w/pto on a skidsteer. For a tractor, it would need a skid steer atach plate put on the loader arms, and remote hydraulics.

Check out these links; some even show implements installed.
www.skidsteersolutions.com/pages/9/
www.top-power-tools.com/buy/12839

Possibilities... /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[dourobob]

These are great Robert - thanks
Now, does anyone have similar websites/pictures of the PTO and undercarriage set-up for front mount blowers that seems to be the main alternative to hydraulic (except, of course, for the drag behind style which I am still investigating).

Bob