I was plowing a new lot last week in a 580e case and was stopped abruptly. it was an asphalt lot so i had the cutting edge slightly down and was in 2nd at half throttle. scared the **** out of me. turns out a fence must have been there and a little concrete footing was sticking up about 3/4 of an inch. This was my first winter plowing and im a relatively new operator. after that i pulled the snow out in reverse where i thought more would be and im glad i did. (about6 more) My boss said he knocked himself out once with his foot on the throttle burning the tires down. Whats your story? Frank
Been there, done that. Scraping ice with a JD 410D. Plowing warehouses that have concrete pads for trailer landing gears. Nothing like trucking along at the top end of 2nd and coming to a dead stop. As uncomfortable as they are, I always wear my seatbelt while plow in a machine, I dont want to kiss the windshield
I'm not sure what my father hit but once he sheered all but two of the bolts right off for the cutting edge on his 310SE:Banghead
I did pretty much the same thing plowing a street in a new development we were working in, using a 680. Hit a water valve box that was maybe 1/2 inch above the rest of the pavement. It ended up a good 1 1/2 inches out of the pavement on one side, (until I sat on it with one of the stabilizers. ) It put a nice ding in the cutting edge too...
we also use a 410d for plowing. i think if i would have hit it with that i would have ripped it out. the difference between the two machines is night and day
Last year I got knocked out in a bobcat ss, after hitting the stub of an old street sign that was cut off on a sidewalk. I was leaning forward looking at the bucket when bam! got launched forward, head hit the glass & lights out!
Up there in Metro Toronto, I was working for the contractor that had city streets AKA Metro Transportation area 4. (Scarborough) All of the plowing I have ever done has been with a motor grader CAT 140 or a Champion 740. While cleaning up one Feb night, I was running with just the main mouldboard down on float as usual, just pushing it back tight against the curb for rush hour in the morning and....hit a little chunk of some really hardpacked ice. it snapped the mouldboard back about a foot and it sprung back into place. I didn't think anything of it because I had seen this before. Low and behold I lift the blade at the end of the pass and go to swing it, it only goes a few feet. oh oh! I ran for another few hours and took her in around 4 am. They pulled the cover off the turntable gearbox (CAT) around 9 am, and the crown gear is not only made of aluminum, its broken into 4 big chunks....BUT to save my ass slightly, there wasn't a drop of gear oil in the gearbox and the mechanic showed where a seal had gone bad along time ago and not been fixed. (they wouldn't have fired someone over that anyways) Now living in the south I look back at the snow removal and miss it alot. But I'll be a rats ass if I plow in a truck. That would be horrible.
Dad was plowing a lot with a 550 Ford several years ago when he hit a manhole that was up a little bit. It broke the bottom hinge pin on the bucket and folded the ears completely over. That same manhole has broken several cutting edges!!!!!!!
I was sent to plow a culdesac for the town I was subbing to, they neglected to tell me the final course of asphalt had yet to be laid. There was a catch basin dead center of the culdesac that was raised up about an inch and I hit it with the center of the blade of my pickup with a full load of snow. I think the front of the truck went in the air about a foot as the truck tried to run up over the plow, I ended up on the dashboard and the hoist frame folded up under the truck. Fortunately I wasn't injured, I chained up the plow and had to buy a new hoist frame.
I was plowing the parking lot at Allied Control at the corner of West st and West Main st in Plantsville for you ct guys with a Trojan 4000 and their maintanance dept. sent a guy out to guide me so I wouldn't do any damage.This might have been the blizzard of '68 but it seems like it was later than that.In any case there was a lot of snow. Well,I am plowing and stacking and I noticed that the whole area was turning blue so I stopped and asked "Vaughn",their site guy about it and we concluded between us that it might be water that was causing it.LOL It turns out that I took off a hydrant over near what used to be a phone booth and I did recollect that there was a small blip on one of my passes.......with that 5 yard machine in motion it doesn't get too disturbed with a trivial thing like that and with that 853 screaming,well,what is there to hear? ) We finally got the water department out and after some hassle of finding the gate valves we got it under control. I had seen that hydrant a million times and so had their official lookout but the one time we needed to know where it was.....duh.Ron G
Over the years I've hit many things laying under the snow. Manhole covers, survey monuments, stumps, rocks, mailboxs , expansion joints. Been lucky though as damage to equipment has been minimal. I was shoving back the snow banks one day with the Vee plow and wing extended. I was taking a good cut with the Vee rolling the banks back. The Vee hit a rock and the jar gave my neck quite a snap. This one hurt the most. I was off work for a couple of weeks.
not plowing but related. went over a 12 in. log with my loader. dummy didnt drop the bucket. over the dash around the exhaust. all that saved me i have throttle that has to be held in position. never again do i move it without seat belt fastened
I too have hit many things. Always wear your seatbelt, one face plant against a window or being shoved into a steering and you will learn. I have known operators who went to the hospital for stitches. When you hit something and you will, don't feel ashamed tell your coworkers what and where you hit it so they will know. Telescooper
I made sure my boss was aware of it. he was with me at the time and i was pissed because i thought he did this lot last year. the two of us are the only ones who run the equipment and hes doing less the longer im there.
About 10 years ago, I was pushing snow with a front end loader at a missile site in Montana. I was in a parking lot so I had the cutting edge tilted down scraping the packed snow and ice off and hit a manhole lid thet was sticking up about an inch...launched that sucker about 50 ft. Last week, I was clearing a driveway with my TL 130 on a drive that hadn't been touched all winter. The driveway went up hill from the road to the house and was cut into the ground about 3ft with dirt banks on both sides. There was over 3.5ft of snow on it so I started at the top pushing the snow down the dirt shoot to a spot at the bottom that I could pile it. About the third trip down the hill I had removed enouph snow to expose the bare ground which was ice. If you haven't ever been on a rubber tracked machine on the ice on a hill before, it's a real experiance! Anyway, I caught the edge of the bucket in the dirt on the side of the driveway which sent me into a spin, bouncing and spinning me from one side of the driveway to the other all the way down to the bottom, about 300ft. At least I missed the barbed wire fence at the bottom.:woohoo
one time plowing a state road with the ten wheeler dump truck i was driving at the time, i caught a manhole just right and shot the cover in the grass and ended up breaking the ring also.... had to go look for the cover in about a foot of snow then gently place it back in the ring... ended up having to get an orange barrel to put on it:beatsme oh well
Your not the only one grader4me.:drinkup I could fill up pages of threads on all the mailboxs that ive hit while trying to run wide farm equipment up the busy roads around here! I replaced them all of coarse:falldownlaugh
ya gotta break a few eggs to make an omlette.
The draft arms on Terex Ts14Bs do a number on mailboxes too :drinkup
Me too!! :drinkup
I too, have hit many things buried in snow or under a large snowbank. Some, when using a 280 Michigan you don't notice. Others, when using a Case 580, you notice right away. For those of you plowing now, wearing a seat belt is extremely recommended by this old hand. I've pitched up into a windshield many a time and it's no fun to go home black and blue. In the northern Michigan gas and oil fields, we made it a practice to examine everything we were to plow before snow fell, and we worked in conjunction with the owners contractors and field hands to mark everything with a tall pole painted orange that was in the areas to be cleared. Of course, you always miss something that should have been marked and after a long season, some markers disappear. Then too, you get more work after snowfall and you never get a chance to see and mark things. In that case, we always walked a new contract first in the snow, feeling with our feet for any obstruction. Working in a field that produces poison gas (hydrogen sulfide) certainly grabs your attention I'll tell you. I had to do an airport once whose original contractors equipment was not up to the job and got busted up so bad he couldn't do the job. It was a 6000 foot runway and the snowbanks had been allowed to close in right on the runway. It took me and the reliable ole 280 a week to clear, pushing the banks all the way back to the treeline. Once I'd done that, we used a Deere blade the rest of the winter to keep it cleaned up. Cost the owner a lot more money than they figured, but it was their mistake to go cheap in the first place. Plowing snow is a lot of fun with a good sized machine, but it gets old after a long and snowy winter. I'm glad now that I don't have to deal with the white stuff, which has become a four letter word to me and the ole lady.
thank god it is snowing. i pulled up a curb box with a komatsu loader and a bull plow. my head still hurts. merry christmas
BeforeI left good old New Jersey I did a lot of plowing in Port Newark/ Port Elizabeth seaports. Both areas have railroad tracks all through them. We would always try to remember where they were but with so many it was hard. We used loaders to do the work Cat 980 and Cat 988's, it didn't matter what size machine you were in if you hit a rail you stopped. So I agree with the previous posters Seat Belts are a must! And by the way I don't miss the white stuff a bit.
i once heard of a car that got stuck in a ditch along a road.The road drifted over and when they went out with a big front end loader they found it....after it had been tumbled a few times.....:falldownlaugh
that happened "kind of" in the small town i grew up in south dakota back in the early 70's. after basketball practice, one kid's car wouldn't start, his parents came in and picked him up. his buddies thought it would be fun to cover his car with snow. wind came up that night, and created what appeared to be a drift over it. the city plow guy comes by with his wing down on his grader....it rolled twice, totaled.
back in 1969 i was plowing a school driveway in front of a high school. about a 3/8 mile long straight run. third pass away from sidewalk I caught a manhole and launched the old guy sleeping in the passenger side into the windshield. broke the plow rack and later that year lost a set of duals off same truck hauling topsoil. the force of the impact on the manhole apparently stressed the studs. in 1993 was was clearing the harley davidson lot in york,pa and cleaned off a fire hydrant with a 416 cat hoe. what a mess till they found a valve box and shut it off. a "FEW" mailboxes plowing for penndot over the years also. Bill B.
Ouch
I've hit a lot of thing cleaning up slabs on demo site that sent me for a ride, but not much pushing snow. I use pickups with plows mostly though. We did a lot of gas station and we had to find the the tank cover every time before hand. If you where lucky you only took the lid off and packet the hole full of snow and had to come back when it was all frozen since they couldn't fill that tanks. If not a broken valve and lots of snow ETC falling into a 30K gal. fuel tank isn't a cheap bill to fix. That never happened to us though.
Dozerboy, been there, done that on the slab portion. I ran a loader with a demo bucket. 980g pushing a 30ft I beam is one hell of a way to clear a path. Only problem is finding that "stump" sticking up. I have a friend who left teeth marks on the wheel of a 950G when he hit something on the slab.
I've cracked a windhseild in a old cat 955 track loader with my forehead before, I was 14 at the time and really did not have much experience on the machine and I hit a stump either in 2nd or 3rd gear, which stopped the machine and the windsheild stopped me. Dang near knocked me out, but I was still young and dumb so I carried on. Last year I was running the skid steer and hit a stump hidden slightly under the surface of some loose dirt. I was doing my final passes just leveling things up in high speed, the cutting edge found that stump sending me into a windsheild once again. this one was hard enough that it chipped about 1/16" off of one of my front teeth. That one took me about 5 minutes to get my "stuff" back together. The lap bar gave me a nice bruse around my stomach and hurt a couple ribs. I don't think I used that machine for 2 months after that. Sudden stops hurt:Banghead Sorry it was not snow related... we don't get enough snow to plow We usually dont get enough to cover the grass.
When plowing with the skid loader, doing our own driveways, I ALWAYS find the man hole at the end of my grandparents driveway. After hitting it good once each winter then I'm good to go. Other than that the rest of the drives I do are pretty good and I've not had any troubles. When plowing for the township there are a few bridges that have some edges on them that need to be patched up and if you get a wet snow where it melts some you usually find them with the plow and it likes to lay it down, usually taking you sideways a bit. With the grader, I've learned to use the artic. on going around corners but never get it right with mail boxes and usually have to stop quick or raise the wing up to just bypass them. Bout the most interesting thing I've had to pull out has been an Amish buggy that got stuck in a snow drift. The hardest thing I've helped pull out(wish we had pics) was a quad axel milk truck, fully loaded, who when backing out of his last farm cut too soon and backed down into the ditch instead of n the road. Had a 6 wheel drive John Deere 772 grader and a 4x4 Oshkosh hooked in line. Just using chains and pulling tight would not work, but the owners of the milk truck had some large straps. We were able to "jerk pull" it and get it rocking, with the movement were able to get it pulled up onto the road. Only issue we had there, and thanks to the sheriff's dept being there wasn't a huge issue, was one guy who was a friend of the farmer thinks he is mister know it all, he kept getting in the way and this is how you need to do this and that. Finally it got so bad that the officer told him he either needed to shut up or he would have him sit in his squad car. With him out of the way were were able to go about our job and get the truck out safely. Each winter brings new challanges and some of the same ol same ol but we get through it each and everyday. Trbo