Neil from Messick's here, outside with a snowblower, a plow, and a push box. We're going to have a short conversation today about different snow weapons and what might be the best implement for your snow removal chores. No one implement is always the best for every conceivable condition or application that you might have, and that's very, very obvious with snow attachments. Not any one of these is always the perfect piece. They each have their own pros and cons.
Starting here with the Snow Blower. Snowblowers are fantastic in those big heavy snows, where things like blades or push boxes just accumulate too much material out in front.
Snowblowers are also good for repetitive snows as well. If you have a blade, for instance, and you push the snow to the side and it hardens there, you can't continue to get that snow back over top of the pile again, and your sides slowly creep back in towards the middle of your driveway or the area that you're clearing. Being that the snowblower can chuck the snow, it'll take it and throw it up over those sides, and you can always continue to push those edges back as you continue to clear if you have long snow seasons.
One of the downsides of snow blowers are is that they're slow. You can't cover nearly as much ground, nearly as quickly as you could with a lot of the other attachments that we're going to look at here. They also are really demanding on the machine. PTO-driven snow blowers, smaller ones, can work fairly efficiently at low horsepowers, but these skid loader ones that we often see contractors and stuff running sometimes don't work great on smaller units. It takes a lot of hydraulic flow to run a skid loader-mounted snowblower properly.
Most of these, while they do make standard flow models, we're going to really encourage customers to have high flow equipment in order to run a snowblower like this so that you're getting enough hydraulic horsepower out into that piece in order to really work efficiently.
Snowblades are perhaps the fastest way to get most snows removed. If you've got really long straight shot, say, long lanes or driveways or roads to clear, angling a blade sideways and driving quickly and rolling that snow off the side is going to be the quickest and most efficient way to get it out of the way. It does have its limitations though. Blades aren't very good at doing things like wide-open parking lots, cleaning up the edges of the spoils falling off the sides and stuff in a big wide open space, and having to continually roll piles over on top of themselves. It can make this a really challenging piece to use if you have, say, parking lots to clear, but blades are great for those long shots. It's a very quick and efficient implement.
They fit well onto most equipment. It's a piece that you can put on to most, any tractor skid steerer You name it, you'll be able to find a snow blade for it. There are some features and stuff that are fairly important to look at in this kind of thing. For one in the width of your implement, you typically want to be a good 12 inches plus wider than what your machine is so that when you angle this thing sideways, you're still adequately covering your tire track. You want to pay attention to the type of trip that these things have. There's always going to be some kind of safety trips in case you happen to catch a manhole cover.
This one right here is a trip edge, which we do tend to prefer over the style where the entire moldboard in the front will try to trip over, so that's a nice setup. These are usually built really heavy. This particular Virnig one is fantastic. You'll sometimes see some guys do a little bit of limited dirt work with one of these if you have some soft material and stuff that needs to be moved around throughout the year.
Third, in our lineup down here is the Push Box. Push boxes are something that is usually my choice to go to if I have snow removal that I'm going to do. I like the boxes because the wings on the side will help catch that material and allow you to efficiently get the job done by not having little dribbles leftover off the sides of your plow. Not great for long shots. You're only going to go so far before you get so much material in front of that push box that it's not able to continue to push it forward. It'll have its limitations when it comes to those lanes and roads, but it's really, really good and very effective for things like parking lots or intersections and those kinds of things where you want to try to get things as clean as possible.
Push boxes also usually will have options for rubber or plastic edges on the bottom of them to keep from marring up driveways. This is one thing that I'm seeing a lot of increased interest in lately, particularly on small tractors. You can have that edge on the bottom for people that have new driveways, new homes, and those kinds of things. That edge will keep you from marring up your brand-new asphalt surfaces. Even on a lot of our small compact tractors now, we're starting to sell push boxes because of that specific option. Some of the better boxes like this Virnig are going to have a little bit of left-to-right flex in them.
If you look in the backing plate here, you can see it's not rigidly tied to the machine. That's going to allow it to flex and contour the ground a little bit better, so you're not letting snow drip out underneath of it. You'll see a wide range of pricing on these things. They can be actually really inexpensive because it's some simple steel with simple welds, but the better ones are going to have things like adjustable wings or left to right float, and some things that just make them a little bit nicer to use and a more efficient implement. It's one of those things you do pay for the features, but the really basic ones are really cheap, and for that reason, a great implement to have on hand.
Another cool thing that push boxes can do that pretty much every other snow implement can't is pull backward. If you notice these holes here in the top of the wing, you can get an additional plate that will go across the top here, so if you're a snow contractor and you need to pull back from a garage door, you can roll that box forward, use that front lip in order to catch the snow and pull backward. That's a function you can't do with say a snowblower or a blade.
The final snow implement is your Loader Bucket. All of our tractor skid steerers construction equipment are going to have some kind of bucket on it for the year-round work that you're doing. That bucket also works just fine for most of your snowfalls. A bucket like this is usually good for those light snows when you're getting two, three, four inches or so. When you start to get higher volumes, it starts to become pretty challenging in order to get those volumes of snow moved to the right place with a standard dirt bucket like this. We do see a lot of guys offer some big oversized buckets that have a huge light material bucket to use for snowfalls.
In fact, that's one piece that we use ourselves often here around our parking lots and stuff, is a big oversized snow bucket. A good piece to have on hand to take care of these snowfalls. If you're in a cold climate like we are and you get a surprise November snowfall like this, give us a call at Messick's and let us know if we can help with your snow implements. We are available for all of your parts, sales, and service needs as well. Check us out at www.messicks.com or 800-222-3373
