Good morning John,
Looks real good. I have no experience with snow plowing using a tractor and got a comment and question. Looking at the geometry of the action looks to me pushing is better than pulling, in other word having the blade in front rather than the rear if you're going forward. Let say you have 2 feet of snow, would you not compress the snow before the blade gets the opportunity to clean it out in the configuration you have? How would you get rid of your spoil in that configuration? Would it not be better to reverse the blade and going backward? I know control going backward is more difficult. I suppose you can put the blade/plow in front but have to add support and extra hyd control where you already have the lift ad 3 point to use. What do you think?
one more question, where did yo get your chain?
JC,
This 1700 is not mine , I just found it on Internet for sale.
Hi JC,
With 4x4, a front blade would definitely be better but with only 4x2 I'm not sure,
I thought the same as you about compacting the snow and wouldn't even try it in this configuration, I had this plow on the back of my modern 4x4 JD with loader and was using it as a supplement to the loader, was trying it backwards to push, was trying it driving forwards with blade reversed over gravel so it wouldn't dig in, that's why I had all that extra weight on it.
Used it a little in the normal position to get in front of doors or at the drive aprons, but wouldn't try using it like that for doing the whole job, even after reading here from many old timers who swore by it.
Got a new contraption for the JD and wanted to use this blade on the Ford, so didn't have much choices and just went for it the conventional way, in this storm there was no problem at all with compaction actually scrapes down better than most front plows?
Was impressed overall at the performance of plowing like this, with using the loader there's actually more passes involved because your picking up every flake, with the angled plow your leaving 90+% of the snow to the side, yes you get spoil build up but you can push that back by backing into the bank with the blade still facing forward to push it back. Didn't have good traction pushing backwards to far though.
Of course nothing like a loader to move piles of snow, but for moderate snows this worked better than I expected. I may put this back on the JD with a power angle cylinder to make it more usable.
That's a sweet 4x4 in your picture, plow looks HD, but maybe to heavy for this machine.
Here's a pic of the other contraption I referred to for the JD's 3 pt.
This is my brain child and though the jury's still out it seems to have performed well in it's maiden voyage.
Been waiting for snow to try all this stuff out, was out side most of the day yesterday, and today it's coming down again pretty good so I'll get some more seat time, soon I'll be cursing the snow
