Home-Built Tractor Great For Blowing Snow

Home-Built Tractor Great For Blowing Snow SNOWBLOWERS Snowblowers 19-2-10 "I've seen a lot of homemade tractors in FARM SHOW through the years, but I've never seen one like the tractor I built, which has live pto for blowing snow," says John Kelly about the 4-WD tractor he built out of scrap parts he had on hand. The Kincardine, Ontario, farmer's tractor uses the frame, axles and drive train off a 4-WD Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40. It has a 258 cu. in. 6-cyl. engine out of a 1975 Pacer car and the transmission out of an early 1970's GM 1-ton truck with a reversible pto unit and heavy-duty 1 1/8-in. dia. output shaft on it. "The heart of the machine is the second clutch at the rear of the 4-speed truck trans-mission," Kelly says. "It drives the Toyota 3-speed transmission with a high/low range transfer case to turn the truck's original 2-WD power into 4-WD power with the Toyota's original 4-WD. The gearing combination lets me do 95% of my snow plowing in second gear on the main transmission and high reverse gear on the auxiliary transmission. "I get `live' power for the pto by engaging the pto and working gear on the main transmission and using the second clutch and auxiliary transmission for all forward, neutral and reverse tractor motion without interrupting the operation of the pto." To make the machine suitable for snow-blowing, the pto is geared down with a 3-speed Ford pickup transmission that Kelly leaves in 2nd gear. Kelly's snowblower is built to run at 540 rpm's, instead of the 1,200 rpm's the truck's 4-speed transmis¡sion runs at. Kelly built the 3 pt. hitch mounted on the beefed up rear end himself. "I copied the design for the 3 pt. from a couple of tractors we had at the farm." he says. "It uses common 3-in. dia. by 8-in. long cylinders and is as close as possible to standards for tractors of comparable size hp. It's powered by a 12-volt electric/hydrau¡lic pump." A 6-ft. wide McKee snowblower mounts on the hitch, as do several other homemade attachments including a trip bucket, a lift boom and a multi-purpose work platform. Kelly fabricated the hood and fenders for his tractor out of sheet metal. He bought a Meade cab from an Allis-Chalmers 190 and adapted it to fit the tractor. In the future, Kelly wants to add a governor, better engine driven hydraulics, and power brakes (it has power steering) to the tractor. "Including the snowblower, I have less than $1,000 invested in the tractor," says Kelly. "I've been using it for four years, doing a route of 20 to 25 driveways and it's been trouble-free. It really works better than I ever thought it would." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, John Kelly, R.R. 1, Kincardine, Ontario, Canada N2Z 2X3 (ph. 519 395-5997).

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