Here is the plow on the ground. Looks pretty nice, right?
One nice feature I put on the main frame is a pair of rubber push bumpers. This way I can push cars or stuff during the times when the plow is off the truck. I picked these up at a car swap meet like 10 years ago because I always thought it would be cool to have a push bumper on my truck. Now I do.
Here's the business end of the blade. After researching personal snowplows, I found that they are only like 18" tall. I cut about 6" off the top of the blade, and reattached it with bolts as the new scraper part of the blade. This stiffens the bottom edge all the way across, and if it gets damaged in some way, I am just dealing with fixing this part instead of the whole blade surface. What's nice about the short height is that even with the plow raised, the headlights remain unobscured. I don't have to fool with the auxiliary plow lights of any of that nonsense.
This is the same area from the backside. I had to basically cut that horizontal top bar off the top of the 6" piece, and grind it and re-weld it back on to what is now the top. Even things like drilling all the holes for all those bolts took a ton of time.
Here's the brackets and parts that make it all work. I cut a ton of steel off the A-frames to lighten them up. Just getting stuff like the huge 7/8" bolt, nut, and washers that serve as the pivot point took a lot of time. I had to go all the way up to Sarjo in North Poughkeepsie. You don't just get that stuff at the local home improvement store. -
I shortened the existing chain that holds the plow in the up position for when you're driving around and such. I re-used the hook that the chain sits in, since I thought the hook and chain were kind of manly technologies. I even had to put a couple of new weld beads on the eye of the hook to restore the amount of material that was worn off of it; now it's like new. Yes, I painted the hook like that because I wanted a...red hook. Incidentally, there is a Red Hook district in lower Manhattan, Dutchess County does not have the only one.
As you can see in the red hook photo, I made adjustable struts to replace the side-to-side hydraulic cylinders. What I did was; using the original cylinder end anchor points, I made these 2 struts that have 3 positions on one end. The steel pin would drop through the two plates on the A-frame, capturing the strut. If both pins are in the middle position, the plow is straight. If the pins are in the shortest position on one side, and the longest position on the other side, the plow is angled towards the short side. Yes, it is a manual, have-to-get-out-of-the-truck operation, but it is easy to do, and I don't know how often you even really change the plow angle. It was necessary to build an angle into the struts so they will clear the A-frame when using the middle or short side positions. I painted the heads of the pins yellow so they will be easier to find in case they get dropped in the snow.-
I'm pretty proud of these struts for a couple of reasons. First, I think it is a simple solution to how to angle the plow. The design seems very sturdy and rugged. The actual construction came out fantastic; the pins fit easily yet snugly into each position. Both sides are identical, a rarity in handbuilt applications like these. This is not really too important, but from a design standpoint, it's something I always like to achieve. This way, even if the whole thing is taken apart, it cannot be put back together wrong. And I got a high degree of accuracy despite basically doing this from measurements and chalk marks on the garage floor. Really. Finally, while it would have been nice to use real mechanical steel tubing, my steel supplier is way out by the Overlook area. I took a chance and went to Home Depot. I put one of the steel pins in the end of a piece of 1" black pipe, and it fit perfectly! Two 4' lengths of pipe easily fit into my car, and while pipe is not as nice as tubing, 1" pipe has a hefty 1/8" wall thickness, more than strong enough for this use.
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Next time we'll look at the winch and wiring, and some other small details. I hate to say it but I am almost looking forward to the snow.
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