Woke up to another 2" of heavy wet snow. With the snow being packed and hard as ice under it...the L2501 didn't want anything to do with it. Just no traction...might have to get some cheapo chains. I'm sure the R14 are better for this than the R4s I have. But after some effort I did manage to get it to plow...the trick was to let some of that wet snow roll under the plow so the tires had something to bite and I spent a good while really scraping the driveway down to almost gravel again now I have more traction. But man I didn't think it would be this difficult. My Polaris Ranger had no issues with this stuff but it had pretty gnarly kobbies on it.
It has never really snowed this much this early before. Last year we went almost to Jan without snow on the ground. The ground here is still soft so its like melting the snow and freezing it creating this thick layer of hard pack and ice. It's really slick. Usually when I go plow, the ground has frozen and it's much easier but its been a nightmare. It's not just me, others are experiencing the same thing.
It's not that the tractor CANT do it, I just have to rethink my strategy on plowing with it. I really feel like the large pads on the plow are kinda screwing me too. They are good in the fact that they kinda stop it from digging into the lawn but I also can't scrap down much either, even the tilting the blade forward just changes the whole geometry of it, instead of digging in, it kinda just scrapes on top of the snow. I might try to take the pads off and see how it goes. I'm going to apologize it my lawn before hand though
I guess on the bright side....I have more seat time. I'm getting really good at operating the loader controls using multiple functions at once. I can pretty much raise and lower the boom while keeping the plow or bucket level and I only have 6 hours of seat time!
