Neil from Messick's here today, with a Kubota BX tractor, loaded to the hilt, with all the attachments and accessories that you would need for snow removal. We spent a lot of time talking about application on our channel, and the different attachments and accessories that you can get for your machine, and the different ways that you might use them. 

Today we're going to walk through this particular tractor and show you all the things that you may possibly want for snow removal. 

A lot of times when guys go through, when they start accessorizing a tractor they go through, say the build and price tools on a company's website and go through and feel they've got to check off every little option that they've got on there so that they can be covered for everything that they might possibly do. Generally, we don't recommend that. You need to know that all of these things are what's referred to as a dealer installed option. These things generally all show up at a dealership in crates and then our shop has a fairly lengthy process that they go through to set every one of these machines up for a customer who's going to be buying it. 

Whether you're buying a tractor that's headed out into a hay field, a job site, or in this case snow removal, we're going to do all of that work with you, going through and picking out the proper pieces that are needed in order to set a machine up for that specific application. We're going to work here from the front to the back of this tractor, starting here on the business end. 

This guy is going out to a snow removal contractor and the tractor really here is set up to run down sidewalks. They're going to be going down and clearing snow off, and spreading salt behind them as they go. A lot of times you think of snow blowers when it comes into snow removal, but believe it or not, there's a lot of snowfalls that brooms are actually a much better attachment. 

We're selling a lot of brooms anymore to school districts, hospitals, municipalities, those kinds of customers, where they don't need to just remove the snow, but they also need to make the surface safe to walk on. For your light snowfalls, you'd be really surprised how well a front broom can do and moving that snow out of the way, but also getting right down to the surface and making sure that it's absolutely clear. 

This particular broom setup has several different benefits that make it really well suited to that snow removal sidewalk application. There's a lot of adjustments on here that you can do to this broom to make sure that it's running exactly right. You have the very basic functions here, from your loader stick on the tractor that's going to lift the broom up and down, and a cylinder here to rotate it left and right, but beyond that, this thing has a lot of attachment points on it that make it float freely from the tractor. 

You can crank this right here to change the angle of the broom and how aggressive it is on the ground. You've got float wheels up here that allow it to oscillate and move back and forth, so it really is going to do a nice job of staying on the ground. That's a little different when we get into, say some brooms and stuff that we can put on three-point hitches. They often don't have the amount of flexibility and ability to contour quite like this one does. 

If you're going to be out in the snow for a long period of time, a cab is obviously a very nice thing to have on your tractor, right? You'll hear me talk pretty negatively about aftermarket cabs going on to tractors, there's good cabs and there's bad cabs, let's say that. There's a lot of machines where when you put a cab on to a tractor, you really overall lower the value of the machine. 

That's because when you put those on, they can rust, they rattle, they don't go on well. However, the quality of some of these cabs has been improving, and this is one that we would say has taken a step forward of some of those impressions that we would have had in the past. You're going to see when this cab drops onto the BX Series tractor, it fits on the machine very, very well. It's molded to the tractor appropriately. There's a lot of nice switches and stuff up in the headliner to be able to put on lights. The heater up here on the dash is very clean. It integrates with the tractor well and it has good controls on it. 

As cabs go, I feel pretty good about this one even though you may have heard me talk negatively about them in the past. This guy has got this thing loaded up with a lot of different options as well to help with that snow removal. We've got LED lights up here on the top of the cab, on both the front, in order to be able to see our broom, and off the rear as well to be able to see the spreader around the back. 

Anytime we go and we put a front attachment onto a tractor, regardless of its size, you always want to consider having some kind of weight on the back end of the machine. In the case of this tractor, it's 75-pound, per side, iron weights that go back here inside the rims. That's going to help ballast the back end of the tractor to balance out that broom out on the front, just make the machine ride better. I tend to prefer iron weights whenever you can. In bigger tractors, and we can do larger machines, we do a lot of liquid filling of tires. This kind of weight is going to preserve the air cushion that's inside your tire and help it ride better. When you get into bigger tractors, they do become less popular because they're expensive. It's a lot more expensive to buy iron weights than it is simply to fill tires with fluid. 

On the back end of the tractor, we're equipping these with the Kubota Vicon the salt spreaders on the back. This spreader is set up specifically for sidewalk applications. We've got another video that goes back and it compares the different types of spreaders that you can put on the back of a tractor. This one's got a couple of things about it that make it really well suited for this snow removal application. 

Hydraulically, back here using this rear remote, you could open and close the gates from inside the cab making it really easy to turn on and off as you're going from property to property. It's also equipped with a special spout in the back that's going to deposit the material coming out of this into a really narrow area across the back of the tractor. There's several different spout options that you can put on these spreaders that are going to change where the material falls, and this is different than the regular cone type spinner spreaders that just chuck stuff everywhere. This is going to make sure that salt that's in this hopper is going on the sidewalk where it belongs. 

Rear hydraulic remotes are less and less common on a tractor the smaller that they get. This one here on this BX Series tractor is not one that we see very often, so I thought it was worth stopping and pointing it out to you. Kubota only sells this in a double-stacked, two pairs of remotes, puts two levers up in the cab on the fender, and then you can use those two levers to operate this pair of valves, either at the top set or the bottom set. 

In this case, this is a single-acting cylinder that just runs on this top valve and is going to open and close the gate on our spreader, but this is a fairly inexpensive addition to a BX Series tractor. If you have the application that's going to use it. Very, very few implements on this size machine are going to make use of a couple like that, but if you've never seen one of these before. There it is. 

That's just a little bit on this loaded at BX 2380. It's one of the ultimate snow removal setups that we've got. If you have any questions about this machine, you're thinking about purchasing something like this, or if you have parts of service needs for equipment that you've already got, give us a call at Messick's, we're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com