Leaderboard

During a party this past fall my wifes cousin Linda took a liking to my late 1970s C160-8 speed plow rig. Linda is the woman I've mentioned before with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She said she wanted one... well I told her Id build her a unit. I put together a 1985ish 310-8 and got it delivered to her country home in time for this 2 ft snow storm. She knocked back all the snow and im glad she had fun doing it. I believe the quote was "it kicks ass" Yah it broke a tierod... no biggie I'll get one to her before the next storm which is suppose to be bigger this coming weekend. I love spreading the Wheel Horse joy... there is no better unit out there! PERIOD!! Cecil had better have set up shop in heaven... or I aint going!! Tony

I just talked with Richard's wife, and she says he's fine and should be home later today. I'm not going to elaborate any more than that. That will be up to Richard. He's doing well and we'll hear from him soon I'm sure of that!

Got a pane of glass, 180 & 220 sandpaper @ HD, 24 bucks. I laid a sheet on the glass and used painters' tape to hold it. Sprayed water and sanded. Took 3 sheets of 180 & 3 sheets of 220. Too cold to do anything else.

First of all a big hello to members I haven't seen in some time. After selling all my WH tractors near 9 years ago and moving to a smaller lot on a home we built by the beach. I hope everyone is well. I stopped by many times over the years to reminisce about the Wheel Horse days. Now it's time to sell this home. Get another home with a bit more property and get back into this great hobby. I had some great tractors and look forward to it again. Anyway I will be posting a bit more and am glad to be back. Will be good to share words and see who is still about. So to all new members and old members from my days here. Thanks for having me back. Glenn

My wife surprised me with this for my birthday.

-19F here this morning. Thinking about putting on a wet Speedo, & pair of flip flops and going for a nice 2 mile run.

Last night I replaced the transmission drive belt with what I believe is the proper one P/N 7473 on my 417-A. Today I took it out to blow the driveway and it worked fine for about 15 minutes. Then I heard a noise and knew something wasn’t right, so I headed back to the garage. I found the belt had jumped off the pulley and was wedged between the transmission and the pulley. I’ve never had this happen before? There’s two different part numbers given for that belt, I want to confirm this is the correct one? As I was investigating this problem my pager went off for a mutual aid fire call. This was in the height of the storm, to a neighboring department. A department that rarely calls for our help, stating a garage and multiple structures on fire. I am one of the senior members and truck drivers so I was the operator for this alarm. We actually had to follow the town snowplow to get there. The young man in the passenger seat got on the siren, so I yelled at him and said you idiot do you want me to pass him so we can get stuck and not get there? He apologized and I told him in this case slow and steady wins the race. We didn’t get done until dark so my driveway will have to wait until tomorrow, I wasn’t going to have trouble with the tractor in the dark with it still snowing and sleeting. That’s me in the blue coat, I don’t wear turnout gear when I’m driving as I find those big clunky boots unsafe to drive with. IMG_4058.mov

Got this AWESOME shirt 👕 yesterday. HUGE thank you to @Mows4three !!!

Should be a fluffy/light 12-20” snowfall here in Central Connecticut (that’s what we’ve been told) so clearing it will be easy enough. No rush to clear it, do some on Sunday and again on Monday. Company already said we could work from home so I won’t have to venture out in it. Might even be fun dealing with it

I've been getting back into scale model building a bit. I started when I was 8 and did quite a lot for 5 or 6 years. After that I've been poking at them every few years since. For several decades I've been collecting and storing the future projects. I'll be keeping this thread as a record of what I'm up to. Please do feel free to post your own. One of the things I've wanted to build for many years is a model of what my Ole Man drove from back in the mid 1980s. Oil tankers that delivered #6 factory oil. 3 years ago this April I bought an IHC 4300 tractor by AMT and Testor's reissue of a 1960s tanker trailer. I got to measuring the trailer. It's designed to be built as either a single axle short tank or add the extension and use 2 axles to make a longer trailer. Still..... really not that long even for 1960s rigs. Then I got to wondering.... what if I had two trailer kits.... If the tank rear is meant to glue on either the front section separately or the rear section in combination - why can't I use a second kit for a rear extension?? So here's something neat. Look at the tank tops here. The left side is 8.25" long. The 2 right pieces are the back half of TWO trailer model kits. If I add the second back half to the first back half added to the front half ... It comes out to a scale model size of 21.5 inches total length. I remember pretty well that Bruce's oil trailers were 45 feet long. An odd length even back then. This model scale adds up to 44 feet and 10 inches!! This is the model kit of the tractor that I have. My Ole Man drove International S2500s. This is a 4300. Same basic shape but this model is a little longer nose. That was IHC's fancier road tractor back then. The 2500 series was the worker of the fleet. I'll take the chrome off the grill and only use one exhaust stack. The sleeper will be removed in favor of a large hydraulic pump. That basically turns it into an S model. I'd like to go weathered & worn. Never done one.... Tank will likely be a faded aluminum with stains. Internet find picture: This was one of several late 70s IHC S models that the company had. At least 2 were green on a red frame. That's what @Qball drove. Odds are almost 100% he drove THIS TRUCK. Stay tuned.....

It's been a few months since I put a new starter on the K-181 for the reborn B-80. I purchased the rebuild kit for the old one but have yet to find one with the correct bushing on the gear end. The brush end was correct. This morning I just decided to clean it up, lube the bushings and put it back together. It's just going to be sitting on the shelf as a spare. I cleaned up the important stuff, put new brushed in and reassembled it. Leave it to an old electrician to use a 4" sq cover to whip up a hold the brushes down while you put the end cap back on tool. It worked great. Tested and It's good to go.

Ventilation for a belt guard ala @cleat with a Greenlee punch. Bit different pattern Cleat but should work. Coulda had the spacing a little closer. Deburred with a step bit. Speaking of step bits... @Pullstart was here...

After the walloping we got Sunday into Monday I used Mongo to clean up. Mostly it did great but it started running rich. I think the snow was so fluffy it was getting in the air cleaner. Wanted to use it the next day to clean up the plow berms at the end of the driveway and the bendix wouldn't engage. Took the cover off and there was a nice chunk of ice in the tin. Cleaned that out and still no engagement. I ended up using a propane torch on the end of the starter for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. That was all it took.

I woke up this morning to the sound of my neighbor firing up his Kubota. All the driveways were packed tight with 3-4 feet of snow from PENNDOTS plowing. He used the Kubota with the FEL to remove the packed snow so I could get in with the 520H to plow the driveways. We just finished all seven driveways. We had about 10 inches of snow then several hours of sleet creating one of the heaviest snows I had to plow.

Probably not up to code but works great for us.

Still dark outside and miserable--three degrees and a goodly amount of snow for southwest Missouri. If it's that cold, I'm sure it's even colder in Hell--Hell, Michigan that is. I'll bet it's froze over! It's also breakfast time. Wife made ham and beans yesterday along with cornbread. Cornbread means.... Cush for breakfast. I'm sure I've mentioned this before but Cush is a meal my grandma would make. It's crumbled cornbread, plenty of pepper and water added to give it body. Grandma would heat the cornbread mixture in a skillet but we use microwave. The gravy has some of my double smoked bacon. I cook the bacon so it's just a little crunchy and we make the gravy somewhat thin so it mixes with the cornbread. Mercy it's good eating.

It has been a few years since I got a storm that we’re gonna have that last two days. So hope everybody that is affected by this stay safe get plenty of warm-ups hot chocolate whatever keeps you moving. Here’s a couple pics that I just took.

We got about 18” with drifts 2-3’. I’ve had the blower attachment for years, but most of our storms are ink the 6” range so never really had to use it. The beginning of this season however, I said what the heck, and put it on the 416-8. Well I am sure glad I did, that single stage on a 16hp Onan throws the snow unbelievably far. I probably could have done everything with the blade, but my driveway would have been 33% narrower. Had so much fun, I helped my neighbor too.

Today I got the 414-8 ready to move the snow and sleet that is forecast for tonight and tomorrow. Have chains if needed and the rear tires are filled with rv antifreeze and have a mule drive weight bracket with twenty pounds. Hopefully all is ready. Be safe!

I think we're pretty much ready. We actually got more snow (19") in the previous big storm than what is predicted for this storm, but that was a bit of a hassle, so I'm taking a couple of extra steps this time. The last big storm was 'comparatively' local and caused a lot of power outages, some of which took a few days to remedy. Since the coming storm is so widespread, if there are a lot of power outages, the service crews will be spread thin, so outages may take a long time to fix. We have a backup generator, but major outages can affect a community in other ways besides loss of residential power. Prep stuff: Set up a temporary plywood cover over the air intake end of the automatic backup generator to (hopefully) prevent snow from drifting up against it. During the last storm the snow built up very high against it, and it sucked in so much snow that it clogged the air cleaner. When I heard it running roughly and saw the snow, I figured out what happened. It was an easy and quick fix, but but I want to avoid that happening again. Exercised the backup generator when it was 5 below zero last night to make sure it would start up OK. No problem. It has a heater that wraps around the oil filter and automatically warms the oil and block a bit when it gets below a certain temperature, which I'm sure helps. Bought a new bag of calcium chloride de-icer. Connected an extension cord to the oil pan and block heaters on Mr. Case (loader/backhoe), which might be our snow removal tool for this storm (as mentioned, my 522xi snowblower tractor isn't back in operational mode yet). Connected a trickle charger to Mr. Case's battery to keep it up. Checked the propane levels in the tanks (our generator and stove run on propane). Had our heating oil tank refilled a couple of days ago. Mrs. Blue Chips picked up some extra groceries (so far, there has been no run on the stores here, probably because they're not predicting an ice storm in our area). Checked the fuel levels in both of our vehicles. Recharged the flashlights. Put fresh fuel in my Husqvarna backpack blower and started it up. As mentioned, I want to experiment with it a bit to see how well it can blow snow off the driveway. And of course, I checked our supplies of 'comfort food' items (rum, chocolate, cheese, etc.). Bring on the snow (but not too much of it)! Stay warm and safe!

Yes, but you can get ahead of the crowd and make a killer deal on a mower deck!

Anyone heard from @953 nut ? I'm missing his daily post.

Wow, $400 for the hub caps and a free 416H.

Took advantage of being snow bound. No reason to get out and too cold for me to enjoy being out so I went through our hundreds of slides and transferred them to the computer. Fun to look back to the mid 1960's of family photos. Lots of memories and things I hadn't thought about for years. For one, that's me on my first mower. I don't remember what it cost. I'm pretty sure was a Montgomery Wards, one forward speed and one reverse speed. The blade was a direct drive--If the engine was spinning--the blade was turning. I believe Ward's mowers had tread on the tires and Sear's mowers were smooth. I'm guessing that if it was in gear and a lad pulled the starter rope and it fired off, said lad would be slow chasing his mower.

Gave her a test drive today. Most definitely a huge improvement, and I already loved this thing before. Reduction steering is a massive plus on fat front tires. I can steer with one finger now. Hydro is much faster. Now it drives like any other Eaton as far as I can tell. Of course the foot control makes it better. I went ahead and changed the engine oil and filter, even though it had only 10 hours on the clock total. I built this engine so I wanted to make sure it was cleaned out just in case. I always do that with rebuilt engines. Oil change before 5 hours and once more about 5 hours later. She's good now for 50 hours run time. Took pics just to prove we do in fact occasionally get some form of white stuff...

January 26, 1932, To bypass Prohibition laws, a U.S doctor writes a note for the visiting Winston Churchill, saying his "post-accident convalescence... necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at mealtimes."

Present situation, neighbor has already made one pass with his walk behind snowblower. The stable is confused why they are still bedded down with their horse blankets. The reasoning behind this, calcium deposit removal with rotator cuff repair surgery this past Monday. I will be wearing this thing for 6 weeks, completely restricted left arm use for that time, no driving, nothing… Grateful for helping neighbors. Never take your health for granted.

I don't switch oil. I switch tractors. Winter tractors use 10w30 and summer tractors use 30w.

I'm sure shoveling snow would be a pleasure with a couple of Wheel Horse Jr. snow shovels.

My boss said I'm not allowed to go out till it's over. Time to fry up some deer scrapple then watch some football.

I am going to rearrange my snow horses so the blower (which I haven't used in a few years) can be first out. This is supposed to be fluffy snow and the wind pattern around my shop puts a big drift in front of the doors. Pics are from 8 years ago expect something similar Sunday'

What @ebinmainesaid is very correct. This is a question with a lot of variables, like temperature, weight/wetness of the snow, the plow, the tractor, the unladen weight of an African Swallow. The general rule of thumb I have been using is 3/4 the height of the blade is doable for your initial cut, but don't stop for anything until you break free into the road (be sure to clean up after yourself there), or you get it to where you want to leave it, of you will make a lot more work. After my first pass up the middle I angle the blade and don't ever take more than a 1/2 blade width, less if the snow is deep, or heavy.

Wait a minute... the classified add @ebinmaine responded to said "gently used on sunny mild days by an elderly grandmother to plant petunias in nice, soft sandy loam soil ".

The one thing that I don't like about snow blowers is that it is usually cold out when you need to use them.

I sent a text to the number I have on file I will let you know if I receive a response.

The 520H had been acting like it was starving for fuel during the tail end of the last storm clean up. I actually had to leave the warm cab and brave the cold to finish with the 312H. I had installed an epump last fall and she had been running fine till now. Time to find the problem before the next storm that is coming this Sat. I pulled the line off near the carb and turned on the epump and got barely a dribble. Nice thing about the epumps..you don't have to crank the engine to check for good fuel supply. So, I went to the other end and pulled the line on the fuel tank petcock....not even a dribble. from the tank. The petcock was clogged with dirt. A good cleaning of the petcock and flushing the tank and back together and running like a happy ONAN should. When installing this I like to coat it with vaseline then just start the valve in the grommet before pushing the grommet into the tank then push the valve barb into the grommet.

Well a little bit of thawing seemed to really help. Wet concrete grips better than frozen. So got a couple driveways done. Then my friend and I got a Wheel Horse Man Date in as we plowed the parking lot for small school. Mine is the 416-8 and his is the 417-A. We were plowing after dark for a few hours. First time I needed the headlights for work. Was glad I had them though. Parking lot lights were out. But we got it cleared off pretty good.

Too much snow for my 520HC with the plow so I got out the big girl. First time it has been started since last fall an parked in an unheated coverall building and we just had a very cold weekend. But the diesel engine roared to life almost instantly.

Looks like it came with the super rare cutting board belt guard !! 😂👍🏻

Sorry, I keep posting the same tractor…first pic was sometime this morning, last pic was this evening. Snow is still coming down

Could not handle another day of boredom so I decided to warm the shop up & do something. Took a bit to get it from 7F to 60F but once there I was able to get the sheet metal blasted. Started the filler work on the hood. It was littered with several dings.

Turfs, rubber chains, and weight works for me on my steep paved driveway.

Same here. Sleet and freezing rain is forecast after the snow. I want the ice on top of the snow so I can plow it off.

The snow is going to continue until after midnight. It will be undisturbed by me until day light tomorrow....

Remember kids, artificial intelligence is no replacement for natural stupidity. But they are working on it.

Feel free to watch a few of my or Trina's videos. See how we move snow. We have a gravel drive and keep the plow angle forward to the third hole down. That helps it roll off the ends. Lots of folks use a wax or spray lube. We rarely do. DRESS WARM. If it's heavy snow you'll want to plow a lot more often so you're moving less. Or, take very small bites. Maybe a 1/4 plow width. If it's light fluffy snow you can move a good strong 8 to 10 inches off to the angles side with decent speed. Do NOT let the snow get piled up and come over the top. That'll bury the plow frame and get you stuck. Stop. Back up. Take a smaller bite.

Eatons in particular, act very different from cold to warm. It's best to drive it around for 15 mins or more to warm it up before jacking the rear wheels and adjusting the cam. Even then, I have to set my brake just to be sure it won't creep. Looks like a solid tractor. Rare to see hubcaps nowadays that are relatively rust free. That tells me it was stored indoors at least. I certainly would have grabbed it for the same price you paid. Well done! Change all your fluids and filters and put it to work!

My 520-8 with a Magnum 10 gettin it done!

January 25, 1924, the first Winter Olympics take off in style at Chamonix in the French Alps. Spectators were thrilled by the ski jump and bobsled as well as 12 other events involving a total of six sports. The “International Winter Sports Week,” as it was known, was a great success, and in 1928 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially designated the Winter Games, staged in St. Moritz, Switzerland, as the second Winter Olympics.

Guess I need to pay Mows to be my friend...