Good morning Don't laugh I had a thought the other day. Our 135 Hitachi's hoes run rubber street pads so we can cross and work on pavement. Now if a guy put rubber track pads on a small Cat, D3, D4 a fella might be able to get some work for his cat for snow removal in town, large parking lots say? I've never seen a little cat do this work before but It might work out really well. What do you fellas think? Am I nuts or on to something? Anyone make rubber pads for little Cats?
Its a thought, one thing is a dozer doesnt have much speed and if you just put rubber pads on your tracks I dont see much traction happening. I could be wrong though
I think the answer is that, yes it'll work but there are far better ways of doing the same thing. The dozer is too small for big parking lots (other than maybe pushing back the banks) and all you can do is either a straight push leaving lots of windrows or an angle push. You don't have the option of an inverted v, like on a BOSS plow, to carry the snow. I've done large and small parking lots with several different pieces of equipment and a dozer usually is too slow, especially if you went from one parking lot to another. Would you run it down the street or load it up and haul it?
We usually use a grader, 950 loader, plow truck and 3 skidsteers for our main mall parking lot. Takes about 5-6hours with everything going. Just trying to find a way to use another machine rather than have it sit and not work. I think it would be best to have it sit on site, as the other machines are much more mobile and skidsteers are easy to move.
More than likely you will run out of traction and spin out. Snow also gets packed in the tracks and can cause problems. If you want to get an idea how it works take a skid steer with rubber tracks on it and try that first. Crawler tractors get their traction by putting a lot of steel on the ground with growsers that will dig in. Have used D3 here once in a great while when in a real bind on my shop lot which is gravel. When there is 4.0 feet of frost in the ground because it is scraped off and driven on not much of anything for the growsers to bite into.
well they have rubber pads on sideboom tracks, so I would say that they are available. my experience with tracked skidsteers in snow.... is well they are way more better in my book. I would take a track over a wheel any time... but that's my preference as I think they move a lot more snow than a wheeled skid
I have a small dozer in Wisconsin tried to use it to move snow once, not a problem untill next day all tracks were frozen, idlers locked up and were wore flat on the tops. Unless you put into a good heated garage don't do it. I use a bobcat with a snow plow blade, 10 times faster and better job. Good Luck
I have used my D-3 C hystate to move back snow bank windrows on long gravel driveways. Much better than beating on the pickup truck. Just wear your seat belt in case you encounter a hidden object. Steel grousers can act like ice skates and you can slide sideways on a slight hill if the ground has a layer of ice under the snow. Local towns sometimes use a dozer at a snow dump to pile snow if space is tight or there is lots of snow to dispose of.
Thanks for the tips I got the idea about using a smaller dozer after seeing more and more skidsteers using blades instead of buckets the past few years. I figured with rubber pads (so as not to tear up the asphalt) a smaller dozer might work well. Thanks for the responses.
I'll send pics when I figure out how to post them, but we have a JD 350c forestry dozer (no angle) and last winter we had to bring out the girl to push back piles and relocate them essentially 90 degrees. We in New england got 2 blizzards and several other storms very close to one another with no melting. We ran out of places to put the snow even with using a loader. Due to the cold weather the first couple of storms worth of snow in the rear of the pile were practicaly ice, so it came in big pieces, although this was a small dozer it saved the day as we were expecting another 15-18 inches within the next couple of days. Knowing of track freeze ups, when I was done, I removed all excess snow from under carriage, and drove the machine down gravel road in HI range to "shake off" any remaining stuff, then put it away in a storage building w/o heat and it was 10 degrees out at the time. This was the first time we tried this and now when we prep our winter equipment this is added and treated in the event we have to deploy again. I always thought it was a shame to have an expensive machine with a blade just sitting on the off season doing nothing. Also I had no problems with traction. Like any thing else with a dozer I went with "feel". One last note, I only had steel pads and worked off pavement, but I never marred the road when driving on it due to it was cold and the pads wouldn't dig in. Good luck