Last summer, Sam sold the bulldozer which was his main machine for plowing snow. He started building a plow in 2024, but it got put on the backburner for a long time.
With New Years rapidly approaching, we were waiting for the ball to drop and getting worried about snow. It became a guessing game: what will come first? the snow, the snow plow, or the baby?
I wasn’t sure why Sam didn’t just buy one, but I learned that it was impossible to find a plow that checked all the boxes. Sam gave up the search for his dream plow and designed his own v-plow with a lot of custom features.
Sam saw people putting pvc pipes over the bottom edge of plow blades to prevent the plow from ripping up gravel. He wanted to incorporate a similar feature into his design and made steel tubes that bolt on to the blade. They can be removed easily like the pvc pipes, but they look a lot nicer and should last a little longer. We’ll probably leave them on for most snow conditions since we have a lot of gravel.
Another feature is the adjustable skis, or “skids”, as Sam calls them. The plow sits on three of them.
Two skids are on the sides. You can adjust the angle of the skid by moving the location of the upper bolt. A bushing allows the joint to change angle.
The third adjustable skid is in the front. It’s mounted differently than the other two.
The top is pinned in double shear.
Sam mounted a skid steer quick attach (gray thing in the photo below) to pick the plow up with the telehandler. Most buckets and attachments have a coupler like this, but Sam didn’t attach it as a typical fixed plate. He modified it so the plow can “float” on the quick attach, allowing it to articulate separately. You can see how the pins can move freely in the slot. This way, the bottom edge of the plow can follow the contour of the ground. It’s common for other plows to lift inches off the ground when you drive over a bump.
Sam had the plow painted black. (Unfortunately, everything got sprayed with mud before the photo shoot.) He assembled it and was ready to go.
The telehandler picked it up easily.
The plow finally left the shop!
It looked cool, but there still wasn’t any snow to test it. We were ready though.
Even Buster was ready for snow with his new boots he got for Christmas.
And I was ready for the baby to come out.
The baby had other plans, so Sam decided to bang out one more project in the meantime- a tumbler!
He built it from scratch in under a week! Sam has a sand-blasting cabinet for cleaning up parts, but it doesn’t help with real rough edges. You can fill the tumbler with larger abrasive material or even chunks of scrap metal. Sam ended up choosing a ceramic abrasive. It’s great for deburring edges and knocking off slag from the plasma cutter.
One side of the hexagonal prism opens for easy loading. You can fit a 48″ part in the compartment. We did a test run with random scraps from the plasma cutter.
A rubber gasket seals the lid. Sam also riveted rubber inside the whole tumbler to dampen the sound.
There are big bearings on the sides
and a motor with a VFD to adjust the speed
It sure makes a lot of clatter!
The tumbler is now far away in the shed.
We ended up having the driest, warmest winter in our eight years here. We hardly used our wood stove at all, and it only snowed once! We got just enough snow to test out the plow. It worked great! Sam’s dream came to fruition.
Sam wished he got to drive it a little more. Since I couldn’t cross country ski, I wasn’t too disappointed with the lack of snow this year. And Buster wasn’t as excited about the snow as he thought he was.
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