It was a long day with a few issues but I ended up getting the tractor and brought it home. Pics will come tomorrow.
Initial impression is; I love some things about it, I really like some things and there is one that I don't like. I used it to plow the areas around the house, shop, equipment building and the firewood building. I used the rear blade to plow and the front bucket to pick up the windrow that was produced, then shuttle the snow to a few piles. Absolutely loved HST for this. I love being able to adjust the tractor forward speed on the fly, without having to change gears and then to ease into the pile and stop to dump, without clutching or hitting the shuttle shift. Also loved being in a nice heated cab. I also used it later tonight to plow the driveway. I't a mile long, with a flat section on top and then about 3/4 mile of around 10% and the bottom section of a few hundred feet at around 15%. It was awesome having all the lights on the cab so I could see over the bucket and I could see the blade in operation too. Going down was fine and I ran the 10% and 15% section in high range and that worked fine but I could tell there was less power than the 1547. What I don't like showed up on my return trip UP the driveway. This tractor is gutless compared to the 1547. With the 1547 I could plow uphill (with chains on the front wheels) in high range and 3rd gear, sometimes I would have to shift to second if the plow built up with a bunch of snow. That was with a 96" wide plow that is 24" high. With this tractor, using an 84" rear blade that's about 14" high, it struggled to go up in turtle. I set the engine speed to 2500 rpm and used the HST pedal to control forward speed. I realize that with HST you need to back off on the pedal when the tractor forward speed slows down, which I did, but even so it was slow going. Top speed of around 10 kmh. I doubt this tractor will push my 96" plow up hill in turtle. But I won't know until I can get a method for operating the swing cylinder on the plow. With my old tractor I installed a diverter valve for that purpose and I will likely do the same with this one. However I might just try running some hoses from the rear remote to operate the plow cylinder. If I have to plow uphill in snail mode it will take forever to get the job done and I won't be a happy camper. If my driveway was relatively flat this would be a perfect tractor. But if this turns out the way I think it will, I will either have to develop a different method of plowing or consider other options. I sure didn't expect a 49 hp tractor to have less power than a 47 hp one.
So far I've only plowed the driveway once with only a small amount of snow on it. I will need more seat time to really get a sense of whether this is going to be a problem or not and I will need to try it with the bigger plow.
I'll update this as I gain more experience with the new tractor.
