RedDirt
Gold Member
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2007
- Messages
- 469
- Location
- Northern Idaho
- Tractor
- Kubota BX23, Wards 16HP HST Garden Tractor, (previous) D2 Logging Cat
In November's CraigsList I found a $250 snowblower built for a garden tractor that I thought I could convert to a TPH for my BX23 for a couple of hundred more. I bought it and, long story short, more than a couple of hundred, but once committed I had to continue.
The conversion has worked well, or so it seems; need snow to test. It has been an unusually small snow season thus far at my elevation in the Sierras. Even on a "good" snow year I only expect to use the blower only several times a season when we get a dump that is bigger than I want to blade.
The following few posts will document my conversion.
This is what I started with:
The unit was built for the front of a small garden tractor and was belt driven from the mower deck pulley via a chain drive gear reduction box:
You will notice the rotation of the impeller is opposite of that normally found on a TPH machine. Not only did I have to reverse rotation I also had to change the gear reducer to a speed increaser. Belt drive would have been the cheapest method but although I could get the rotation reversed fairly simply or the speed changed as individual drives I had difficulty designing a combination belt drive that would do both efficiently and compactly. I considered a sprocket drive but it became rather cumbersome. I finally chose a gear drive.
Gears are expensive and they got more expensive when I learned enough about them to pick the right ones. Rush Gears.com has a great engineering tool that helped considerably.
My post regarding impeller speeds led me to look at impeller tip velocity rather than RPM. I was designing around a 4000ft/min tip velocity. To get this from my 14" dia impeller and 540PTO speed I needed a 1:2 increase in speed to get 3953ft/min at the impeller. Using the Rush Gear tool I chose a 6"dia PTO gear and a 3" impeller gear. These are #6 gears with a 1 1/2" gear face to withstand the 16HP PTO.
It took almost a month spare time to research various designs, draw and reject several plans and come up with a final design. Here's my plan. The bottom right drawing is the blower in working position. I was trying to keep my lower and top links fairly flat as well as keeping a small PTO shaft angle. The Upper right is the blower raised. I don't know if I'll ever need to lift it this high but I was looking to see if there was any binding in the linkage, specifically the top link. This view primarily showed me where to place the tie for the TPH "A" frame. The left drawings are the bearings and gears viewed from the tractor. The design added a 1/4" plate to the back of the blower housing to add strength to attach the two flange bearings. The cross members carry pillow bearings. The shafts are 1 1/4" dia.
View attachment Snowblower1_121109-FINAL.pdf
Here is a pic of the almost finished conversion. Next posts will go into the conversion in more detail.
The conversion has worked well, or so it seems; need snow to test. It has been an unusually small snow season thus far at my elevation in the Sierras. Even on a "good" snow year I only expect to use the blower only several times a season when we get a dump that is bigger than I want to blade.
The following few posts will document my conversion.
This is what I started with:
The unit was built for the front of a small garden tractor and was belt driven from the mower deck pulley via a chain drive gear reduction box:
You will notice the rotation of the impeller is opposite of that normally found on a TPH machine. Not only did I have to reverse rotation I also had to change the gear reducer to a speed increaser. Belt drive would have been the cheapest method but although I could get the rotation reversed fairly simply or the speed changed as individual drives I had difficulty designing a combination belt drive that would do both efficiently and compactly. I considered a sprocket drive but it became rather cumbersome. I finally chose a gear drive.
Gears are expensive and they got more expensive when I learned enough about them to pick the right ones. Rush Gears.com has a great engineering tool that helped considerably.
My post regarding impeller speeds led me to look at impeller tip velocity rather than RPM. I was designing around a 4000ft/min tip velocity. To get this from my 14" dia impeller and 540PTO speed I needed a 1:2 increase in speed to get 3953ft/min at the impeller. Using the Rush Gear tool I chose a 6"dia PTO gear and a 3" impeller gear. These are #6 gears with a 1 1/2" gear face to withstand the 16HP PTO.
It took almost a month spare time to research various designs, draw and reject several plans and come up with a final design. Here's my plan. The bottom right drawing is the blower in working position. I was trying to keep my lower and top links fairly flat as well as keeping a small PTO shaft angle. The Upper right is the blower raised. I don't know if I'll ever need to lift it this high but I was looking to see if there was any binding in the linkage, specifically the top link. This view primarily showed me where to place the tie for the TPH "A" frame. The left drawings are the bearings and gears viewed from the tractor. The design added a 1/4" plate to the back of the blower housing to add strength to attach the two flange bearings. The cross members carry pillow bearings. The shafts are 1 1/4" dia.
View attachment Snowblower1_121109-FINAL.pdf
Here is a pic of the almost finished conversion. Next posts will go into the conversion in more detail.