Pickup Equipped With Front And Back Snowplows

Pickup Equipped With Front And Back Snowplows SNOWBLOWERS Snowblowers 30-1-44 Whenever Alan Strange of Kingsley, Mich., drives into town, he gets some "strange" looks. That's because he has a Meyer 7 1/2-ft. snowplow at each end of his pickup. "It lets me plow snow in both directions so I never have to turn around. That reduces my plowing time by half and also saves on fuel," says Strange. "If I want I can angle the blades in opposite directions." His 1987 Ford F-250 4-WD heavy duty pickup is equipped with an automatic transmission. "I came up with the idea because I was plowing snow on three different farms and found it to be a time consuming job. One day I realized that I was spending half my time backing up, so I decided to mount another snow plow on back of the pickup. It operates completely independent of the front plow." The rear plow is operated by a self-contained battery and hydraulic pump that mount in the pickup bed. The battery is wired to the pickup's fifth wheel trailer wiring harness and draws 233 amps on a full load. The wiring harness is able to take a 12-volt charge. However, it's only a 10-ga. wire, so pulling more than 200 amps through it while operating the hydraulic pump might have caused a short and fried the wire. To solve the problem, Strange came up with a couple of relays that break the circuit, allowing the battery to stay fully charged at all times without shorting the wire or draining the pickup's battery. Because of the relays, when the pump is running there isn't a very high amp draw through the 10-ga. wire. He made his own mounting kit for the plow, complete with a lift frame hinge that allows him to open and close the tailgate even with the snowplow on back. He also made a control box that mounts in the pickup cab. The control box has switches that control both plows independently. "Whenever I go to town, I see people stop and point. Some of them ask me how it works so I often give them a demonstration," says Strange. "I can pull right up to a garage door, drop both the front and rear blade, and back away from the house. With the added weight of the rear plow, I can do most of my plowing in 2-WD which saves wear and tear on the pickup's 4-WD system. "The rear plow not only reduces my plowing time by half, but I'm also able to gain at least one more plowing per tank of gas. And with fuel costing $2 to $3 a gallon, the savings add up." Strange says the two-way snow plowing system originally took some getting used to. "However, once I got the hang of it, it didn't take long before I was able to put snow anyplace I wanted. Now I can plow snow as easy going backward as I can going forward. It cleans the snow right up. At first I plowed only half a blade every pass with the rear snow plow, but after a couple of plowings I was plowing full width with both blades." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Alan Strange, Traverse City, Mich. (email: strangeae@aol.com).

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