No More Shoes

Like a lot of farms around, we use parts of the lawn to park vehicles. When snow plowing I occasionally dig up more lawn than I would like. The shoes would dig in too. With the quick snow we’ve had in SW Mich the ground is nowhere near froze and I was digging lawn like crazy when plowing.
All I could do was backblade with no shoes and it worked great but I couldn’t really put the snow where I wanted. So I thought about it a bit and here is the solution I came up with.

I thought about how smooth it worked backblading with no shoes so I thought about welding a back curved piece onto the bottom of the blade but that would dig in when backblading. So what I decided to try was to bolt a 6ft piece of 3in. heavy pipe to the bottom of the plow thinking it would give it a nondigging edge going either forward or back. It works great! And, I have eliminated having to put the shoes on. Going forward it leaves a nice smooth finish just like backblading. Going straight on it works perfect but it does dig in slightly at the edges if I angle the blade too much, I plan on fixing that by welding a cap on each end. And I can remove the pipe whenever I need to dig or move dirt. I just thought of something else. This just might make it easier pushing brush around the burn pile.

Oh well, it’s still a work in progress. Maybe someone smarter could do it better but it works for me.

I dont do my neighbors concret drive anymore so I want something permanent for my drive. I don"t know if the pipe would hold up with a lot of asphalt plowing. If you go from asphalt to gravel a lot you might want to stay with shoes.

Now I"ve got the idea of making another pipe with a row of old spike tooth drag teeth as a mini brush rake (pusher).