Piston Bully plowing dirt?

A while back I joked “I could plow a farm field with this Bombardier”.......I was wrong, it’s a Piston Bully.

https://youtu.be/85Qq_71A5c0

Bob

We pushed dirt with the trail bullys 400's we used.

Oh yeah they got the power! Just got to be careful with the cleats bolted to rubber bands[emoji15]


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they aren't bulldozers. on mine the presser relief is set low and the blade will fold back.
i seen pictures of them mowing fields and pushing silage with them.

Many are used to pile sugar beets in the Dakotas 16foot wide machines
66” tracks, things get a bit sticky

MNoutdoors said:

Many are used to pile sugar beets in the Dakotas 16foot wide machines
66” tracks, things get a bit sticky

Click to expand...

The local (Idaho) sugar beet processing co has about a mid 90s Tucker 2000 at one of their satellite locations. And then last year I saw a brand new 2000 going down the freeway in the direction of main plant on their company semi. I couldn't guess, never seen them use it, thought maybe it was for the board of directors

The local cranberry farmers use them as well

The ski areas here plow the summer roads down to dirt at the end of the season. So they can get an early start on summer projects. After plowing the roads to dirt the cutting edge on the blade is basically ruined. It'll still move snow but the difference is huge. Pistenbully and prinoth both have a lot of pictures of cats doing agricultural work on their social media.

Yeah buddy

The cutting edge on the blade of a snow cat is pretty light as compared to the materials found on a regular dozer....

Most dirt dozers have a very hard cutting edge and in many cases a fresh one can be bolted on........

As mentioned...the tracks were not really meant to deal with dirt.....Aluminum grousers bolted to the rubber bands.....


If used gently they can work for many agricultural applications....but start hogging on things and its gonna get expensive....

Tracks are gonna suffer a bunch of extra wear that they don't see in snow......


But the ski outfits are gonna use what they got in the way of tools....

I know of three track types available for machines. I'd surmise there is really more than just three but they all are made for different conditions. My buddy who runs bully's on beats said that aluminum cleats were the best at that job. So we really need to say which type of cleats is used when speaking of some machine. Our trail bully cleats were 40" wide and made to be ran on the road.


For blade wear edges, seems the builders have figure out that many people run them against the ground or road so they've been made stronger and tougher over the years from doing that. If you look at machines built X years ago, the blades were much, much lighter. While doing sled trails with PB 400's, I was trained to run the blade across the road and clean the snow off the road. It sure growled on asphalt! The blades hardened edges would show serious wear after about 4000 hours. These edges are welded on and we replaced them over time.

Tracks with real high grousers that are mainly for deep soft snow are not going to do well on dirt....big issue is the stress on the belts

The machines I have seen around here being used on dirt and such had been fitted with much less aggressive grousers.

I have seen them fitted with tube steel grousers, low rise channel grousers and a few other combinations.

Many of the tracked skid steer machines are fitted with molded tracks....these seem to deal with the dirt really well.

The huge articulated Ag tractors (Tri trac) usually have the molded rubber tracks.


I think that likely the manufacturers of the snowcats/agcats really do offer a good track setup for ag use..

The ski resorts are going to use what they have handy.....and when it fails they will fix it....


I cringed when watching the winchcat on the dirt hill shoving dirt.

But if the dirt is soft and the tracks are not slipping the only real issue is the blade.

And again if the dirt is soft....not really an issue.....

the worst thing I found for my j grousers aside from barren frozen un even ground was sand it really stresses out the rubber belts trying to lift the grousers out of the deep sand.

I would think sand would be tough on all the undercarriage parts.

I HATE SAND.....

i graded my driveway one time. the crush rock put chips in my drive sprocket.

At the cost of sprockets that can be an easy decision to make.....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

There were some Chinook Pass snowplow operators in the 2004 natl. avalanche school I went to in Reno that year. They said the plow noise was reassuring. The worst part of their job was when the scraping roar stopped. Where did the road go??? We’re they headed into the bank or about to go over the 1000’ drop to the river. Those guys had big.....suspenders.

Indeed "Big Suspenders" and other things too

Trying to keep the road open in the nasty weather with everything going sideways has got to be a spooky job at times.