Every once in a while around here we see a new attachment or implement come through, and think to ourselves,"Why didn't I think of that?" This is definitely one those things for me, we've had push boxes come through here for years for larger equipment, but if you go through and look at what's used to clear the parking lots of malls and big commercial properties, airports they don't use plows, they typically use push boxes. The way a push box works is it's going to collect the material, and the snow inside the box area allowing you to sweep it off to the side, and get it out of the way.
Land Pride recently came out with these small push boxes geared towards popular compact tractors, this one right here will fit right in the front of a BX Series machine allowing you to use that to clear your driveway. It's a huge improvement over doing with a loader bucket like many people do. A common frustration we see with guys of loader buckets particularly with once at newer homes is that when you push that loader bucket down your driveway the cutting edge of the loader bucket is going to scrape up more of your driveway.
If you look at the bottom of the push box down here, the BX Series one has a really heavy plastic cutting edge on the bottom in order to keep you from scraping up your driveway, but give you a nice tool in order to be able sweep that off, and clean it off. Since Land Pride is owned by Kubota they do make some unique mounting options for these that aren't available on standard push boxes. You could see these two right here both have Kubota BX Series mountings on them where you have the center cylinder in order to tip the bucket so, here you mount your two lower pins from your loader, and your center pin right here.
This will also accept the Kubota quick coupler so, if you want it to be able to easily switch back, and forth between this, and the bucket you can use a BX Series quick coupler at a nominal cost in order to be able to slip this thing on, and off easily. There is also larger models available as well that come in a standard skid steer mount that would go on to a B, or L Series tractor. These are built a little bit heavier, and a little bit wider they also get deeper and taller, as well as the size of the tractor, goes up because you can push a larger amount of snow in front of you.
The one other difference that you'll notice too on this is they get bigger, they also swap out the cutting edge for a different material so, where the smaller box uses a plastic edge this one uses about an inch thick solid piece of rubber. On both of these models, this piece can be adjusted down as it wears just by loosening a couple of bolts and sliding it down. Just a few notes if you have one of these, and some operational tips on exactly how they work. When you have the box on the front loader typically you want to drop the thing on the ground, and then push into the snow collecting the snow into the box then running off to the side of your parking lot or, driveway.
You use the rubber cutting edge down here in the bottom to scrape surfaces clean. We're out here in this parking lot, and you could see from the areas that I've done it doesn't get it the whole way down to the ground, but it does a really good job of scraping off most of what's here. It's a really slushy day, and this is an extremely bad parking lot it's in terrible shape, but still, it got most of the crap off the asphalt so that's great.
One thing I was noticing when you're operating this, you got to the thing dropped down flush on the ground for it really works properly so, I was doing that by kicking the loader into the float position letting it drop down on the ground, and then popping it out of float. If you're driving along, and you feel like you don't have traction on your front wheels it's usually, because you're pushing into the box, and the loader's picking your front wheels up the ground a little bit, and you can kind of get some of that front traction back by rolling the box front, or back and kind of adjusting the way that the thing sits on the ground.
Just from the quick spin that I did around the parking lot here, I was pretty impressive, it worked pretty well. It isn't quite as capable as a box on a skid loader, we use those to clear most of our parking lots here around the building, and you can work faster, and more productive with the larger machine and the bigger box, but for the cost of these things, and the fact that it has rubber edges on the bottom, I think it's a really great choice for somebody that has a homeowner or, a small office building, or something that they need to take care of their own snow removal needs.
That's the Land Pride snow pusher if you have any use for an attachment like this give us a call at Messick's we're available at 800-222-3373, or online at Messicks.com
