Anyone with first hand experience with front receiver mount plow?

[dcmdon]

My new Gladiator is at Gupton and I just saw a post of a member with a Snowex plow and it got me thinking.

Has anyone got experience with a front receiver mount plow? I will be putting in a front mount receiver. Ideally for both a winch and a plow.

Any experience would be appreciated.

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[dcmdon]

My new Gladiator is at Gupton and I just saw a post of a member with a Snowex plow and it got me thinking.

Has anyone got experience with a front receiver mount plow? I will be putting in a front mount receiver. Ideally for both a winch and a plow.

Any experience would be appreciated.

is bumping allowed??

 

[johnparjr]

You bumped after an hour or so patience is needed

 

[ShadowsPapa]

is bumping allowed??

No............ask the cat.....

Just kidding! I've not seen anything against it.....

 

[ACAD_Cowboy]

Receiver plows need to be used within their bounds, not yours or the trucks. I don't like them for reasons previously discussed, mostly that they are not some beefy duty balls out lets go plowing plows. I prefer to have excess capacity versus excess needs.

 

[dcmdon]

Within 5 or 6 years, I'll have a 1000 ft dirt driveway. My hope is that it could be used for that.

If it won't then in 5 or 6 years I'll probably put something like a SnowEx on it and remove the front receiver.

My apologies for the early bump. Ha. I've got Covid. I feel fine, but I've been banished to our place in NH by my family. I'm bored stiff. No projects here.

 

[ACAD_Cowboy]

1000 foot dirt path is western/fisher/myers/boss territory.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Mine is about 130 or so feet, all up hill from the garage to the road, and slants to the west a bit. Then I have some recycled blacktop on the south end of the garage between garage and shop approach - the shop approach is 20 x 40' wide. But because of the way the crew the people who were hired to resurface the road out front did their edge at the end of our driveway and because of how concrete stuff does in Iowa (one section drops or rises 1/4") I figured it won't be smooth sailing. I hit the edge of the blacktop road out front and stopped my tractor cold and chipped a piece off the edge of the road. I told the fools to cut and merge - oh, no, it will be fine, there won't be any edge there...... ha. You hit heaves even small ones and you stop if the skids don't jump it or the blade is down too far. things break.

 

[IamPro2A]

1000 foot dirt path is western/fisher/myers/boss territory.

1000ft dirt driveway is you are going to need a tractor anyway to maintain it, might as well use it for snow removal too.

 

[Jaxmax]

He's right about the tractor, I have a 800' foot stone drive going up a hill to my house, and have a compact tractor with loader , york rake and plow, tractor easily plows it and plow might be better then the light weight ones. I hate plowing the driveway though, and will pave it soon.....Jack

 

[dcmdon]

1000ft dirt driveway is you are going to need a tractor anyway to maintain it, might as well use it for snow removal too.

That's a possibility. My neighbor has a similar driveway and he has a drag grader. He said he'd loan me that a couple of times per year as long as I return it clean. ha.

We are still sorting through what we will actually need. Before truck prices went through the roof I was poking around on Cars.com and had no trouble finding some 15 year old F150 work trucks in the 10k range. I focused on southern states and none had any rust. I may revisit the idea of a cheap beater truck when we need it.

But then again I can save $30k by putting in my electrical service myself. To do that I need a tractor with a mini excavator on the back. So that pays fo the tractor. Lots of options.

 

[Mac]

I have a place in Maine with a 1/3 of a mile dirt road in, I have only resurfaced it once in the last 10 years. Had a guy bring in a big machine and 80 yards of lint pack, cost around $2500, had held up very well, will be doing it again this year. Also have it plowed every time there is plowable snow, depends on the year but averages around $600 a year for snow plowing. I have had a 7.5’ Fischer RD plow on a half ton, plowing sucks.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I can tell you first hand that maintaining a long dirt or gravel or rock drive is very hard on equipment. if you don't want to be digging dirt and rock, it's a lot easier to control with a tractor and something with a 3 point hitch can actually be set to be sensitive to the pressure on the blade and rise up if something is pushing it up. I doubt any truck receiver mounted blade would work well in dirt - it's going to either dig, or not get the snow off. And the receiver is only good for 9,000 pounds - that's pull but I bet you'd have that much push with a heavy snow and a 6'+ blade.

I've run snow blowers, front and rear mounted blades and loaders. If you get good with a loader you can skim the snow off and not dig the dirt, and it's easier to move large amounts of snow off the drive. A blade will push it to the side and then subsequent snows where ya gonna put it? Blade won't have any place to push it to the side because of existing hard packed snow and pushing a large snow straight out isn't always an option. A loader you can stack it high.

I finally sprung for concrete where I live now as plowing snow off that rock drive, all up hill from the garage, was a pain in the butt. The side effect now is that I go through a pair of skids for the blade every year as the concrete grinds them down.

 

[IamPro2A]

But then again I can save $30k by putting in my electrical service myself. To do that I need a tractor with a mini excavator on the back. So that pays fo the tractor. Lots of options.

That's exactly what my brother-in-law did with the last house they built. He bought a small tractor/backhoe for almost what they wanted to dig the trench. Did it himself over a few weekends, and still had the tractor when he was done. Face it, if you have enough land to have a 1000ft driveway, you will need that tractor for all sorts of things anyway. Like @ShadowsPapa mentioned, in snow country you need someplace to put the snow. Either you build the driveway twice as wide like they do with the roads where I am, or you need a loader to stack it otherwise there is no place to put the snow after the FIRST big storm. After mud season it's good to repair the ruts before they get too bad, and yea, every so often you need to have material brought in an spread. For our driveway, they wanted $5500 to do that last year. Instead I paid $800 to get 3 triaxle loads and had him tailgate spread it, then borrowed a tractor for a few hours to finish spread and grade it.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I'm still strongly looking at a snow blade for my JT for next winter (no one had a complete setup this winter due to parts shortages) but I've used the heck out of the blade on my lawn tractor.
I bought a clam shell type bucket attachment to put on the blade. My prior JD lawn tractor I made a blade for and I had 27 twin-screw truck loads of dirt brought in by the county as they were cleaning the snow ditches here (they fill in from soil from the fields) and I leveled and moved all 27 loads with that home made blade and lawn tractor. The newer one I have I did similar - 60 tons of black dirt brought in to put along side the new concrete driveway. I used my JD lawn tractor, blade and bucket attachment for that blade to move and level that dirt and to carry some of it to other spots. When I did some landscaping (hardscaping actually) on the back side of the house where our pool once was I used that lawn tractor with blade and the clamshell bucket attachment to move block and rock around and when it was done, to move and spread the dirt and smooth things out
There's no end to what you can use such things for - that blade and bucket attachment has more than paid for itself several times compared to paying to have that sort of work done. And because of the time savings for me moving block around and digging with that bucket instead of the guys doing it by hand, he cut me a heck of a deal - saved a lot of money by me cutting the sod off and breaking things up for them with that rig.

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