Grinding Iced Drive

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The weather has turned to 40's-50's with rain on what was nice packed and cleared driveway. I'm sure alot of folks are now dealing with skating rinks for driveways. As I didn't want to pay some one to sand and salt, I decided to try to grind up the ice, a bit, with my chains by intentionally spinning the rear wheels. So far, it seems to have worked. 600' of drive is now, at least not a complete sheet of ice. Ofcourse, weather in the 40's today helped some.

I didn't get a picture down the drive, before I started but, here's a pic where I parked the car out of the way and did not do any grinding. Nothing but a wet sheet of ice and I wasn't sure I could get the car there without sliding down the drive.

Tom

 

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2nd pic of pre-grinding.

 

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Close-up pic of some ground up ice area.

 

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Last pic...down the driveway.

I had the CUT (HST) in high range and would get going for a few feet (fwd or rev) and then slam the opposite direction, intentionally spinning the rears with chains, sliding sideways, and leaving chewed ice as I went.

Question is; Is this a practice that is likely to cause damage to the HST? I can't imagine it was doing it a lot of good but, it's not like I would do this very often.

Tom

 

[daTeacha]

I've done something similar with my little Cadet, but just nailed the brake instead. Try using a tooth bar on your FEL to break it up. That works fine for me.

 

[Dutch445]

Get something, anything dark on the ice and it will help
a lot with breaking up the ice.
Although, today, in the 50's,, the stuff is pretty soft..
another couple days, and we will be back to square 1!
with thawed ground, no base... and mud... yuck
what a winter

/forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

 

[HEC]

I live in northern Maine and we don't usually have this ice problem but we sure do this winter, must be that global warming thing.I was thinking of building some type of drag with some short alternating teeth on it for my long gravel drive , anyone done that ???I never thought of the tooth bar , I may need to get one of those .
Herb

 

[HEC]

Tom ,I just looked at your pictures that's scarry for sure.My driveway looks like that but is flat so not so bad as yours for sure.I think a drag of some type would work fine,I just have to come up with an idea of what to use for some short teeth, maybe just an inch or two long would work without tearing up the gravel drive. .I have a welder so fabracating a drag wouldn't be a problem for me.
Good Luck,
Herb

 

[daTeacha]

Do you have a box blade? How about using the teeth on that?

 

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DaTeacha,

Good idea but I don't have a tooth bar and no welder to make one. $'s a bit tight so there's no new attachements for me on the horizon. Thought of taking off the blower and RB and putting the FEL and BH on, then just draging the BH's bucket up and down the drive but that would be pretty tricky as reaching the controls while driving on that ice might not have worked real well.

Tom