Thought I may be able to save one of you new guys some troubleshooting in the future. Long story short, my Western plow would not angle or raise and there was a clicking noise under the hood. I replaced the solenoid and it is as good as new. Caution- your plow will lower, but not raise itself up when the solenoid is bad. If you carry a jack, no problem. You just raise the plow with the jack and put your chain in a higher link to hold the plow up. I'm not terribly handy, so I felt pretty good about diagnosing and fixing something I have no experience with. Once I get the manuals, I won't be reliant on my local dealer. (Thank god!) Hope this helps one of you out. Also, I'm going to put a spare behind the seat along with my hoses-- for future use. I'm sure this isn't news to many of you, but thought it may help someone since it seems like a fairly common problem. As with anything electronic, eventually it will go. After 10 years (age of my plow) you expect as much. The part cost $13.50. A spare is cheap considering I could potentially lose an account if unable to perform service in a timely manner.
On our older trucks that still have electric plows, we replace our solinoids at the begining of every season. With our plowing we seem to use 1 soliniod per truck/season.
We had the same problem with one of our older f250's. The driver fideled with the thing and got the plow to go up and thought he had fixed the problem so he tride to plow again. Not the smartest driver, well former driver, He is on the shoveling crew now. Wish I had known what the problem was before though.
