Snow plow for ZTR

[Kernopelli]

I have a J.Deere 680 ZTR that is mostly used by my son for commercial lawn mowing. He has used my tractor in past years to do light snow removal but the liability has me spooked. I decided that if I could make a plow for the mower, I'd feel a little more at ease than having him trailering the tractor, operating it in close quarters etc. I already have a set of tire chains for the Deere and it's built like a tank and only weighs slightly less so I'm hoping it'll be fine for pushing light snow. I apologize in advance about the picture size...my wife must have the camera set up for high resolution or something. I'll try to figure that out for future pics.

Except for some of the hydraulics I am doing the build from scrap I had laying around and that includes a Wheel Horse 42" blade.(pics 1&2) The blade will be 60", which I got completed today as well but I'll show that in the next post.

The first thing I had to do was make a new pin for the blade swivel (pic 2). It was originally set up with spring trip but they are long gone. I decided to simply make adjustable struts so I used 5/8" bolts and made the struts out of them.(pics 3&4)

Next was the frame. I used 2"x2"x 1/4" and 2"x3x1/8" for an A frame design.(pic 5)

Blade extension to come next.............

 

[Kernopelli]

The next task was to cut two 9" pieces of 1/8" sheet metal to make my blade extensions from. I don't have any way to roll the metal so I decided I'd use some heat and hammer it against the blade surface to get the right curve. I grab the torch and...no gas (thanks son!). I then grabbed my homemade carbon arc torch and set the arc welder to 105 amps and heated lines across the plate then hammered. Workedgreat. (pic1). I then cut out two ribs to put on the back of the extensions for support like the factory blade. I used a jigsaw w/bimetal blade for this and it was much faster than my usual cutoff blade/angle grinder method. (pic2). I then tacked the ribs to the "rolled" sheet. Pic3).

I cut two strips of 1/8"x2" and tacked it to the back of the blade to both add a little beef and help align the new extensions and keep a flush blade surface. (pic4). Then tacked the extensions to the blade.(pics 5&6).

I probably won't get a chance to do anything else until next week. Since the blade will sit where the front mount deck/floorboards attach, I still have to make floorboards that are frame mounted, attachment points, get the hydraulics sorted out and paint.