[Hydromaster]

So let me try to understand. For the price of 1 Holder and bi-directional, I can get 2 utility tractors with hybrid blowers?

And then I need to outfit the Holder with hi-def, wide angle backup cameras with Dobly surround sound?

Plus send someone to Holder school to learn how to service and repair them?

Did I miss anything?

Yes,
That even the text you posted here is not yours.

 

[Mountain Bob]

"I can't post our video and pics online because of copyright and trademark fraud"

Well that made me spit my coffee. Now gotta clean the keyboard.

 

[SHAWZER]

Some people are still drinking coffee ?

 

[Landgreen]

An example would be this Connor fella. He has good intentions overall. One manufacturer narrow vison he does have. And he isn't in this business. But, I know a gentleman that uses an old Walter that does county and country areas with it and that machine spanks the living daylights out of a road grader or municiple rig for the same purposes. The Walter ia still the best tool for the job in his area hands down. The gentleman is passionate about his rig. He makes the local papers every winter with it. The municiple guys know the graders and cubic yard dumpers they use can't keep up with the Walter.
.

Who is Connor? Sounds like a great guy. Can you provide a link to these newspaper articles so we can learn more about his business? Sounds like a success story to me.

 

[SHAWZER]

My 7 foot Mckee blower on my small JD Loader

 

[SHAWZER]

 

[SHAWZER]

Wisconsin 65 hp engine , purrs like a kitten . Seems to have enough power to chew through hard banks . Deserves a paint job this summer .

 

[Landgreen]

Wisconsin 65 hp engine , purrs like a kitten . Seems to have enough power to chew through hard banks . Deserves a paint job this summer .

We had a Mckee that was used for blowing back banks. Tough old girl. We really beat on it.

 

[BUFF]

My 7 foot Mckee blower on my small JD Loader
View attachment 236304

Cousin in Wyo "moonlights" for for a sub that has a contract with Pacific Corp running a blower on the wind turbine roads (aboot 30miles) on his dads ranch. Think the blower has a 300hp Cat, he says it'll chew through 6' at full width with ease.

 

[Landgreen]

We have a set of Nokian TRI 2's on our JD5100. In the process of ordering our next tractor I was made aware of the the Nokian Hakkapalliita TRI. They are a single purpose type winter tire. Softer compound and siped. Not sure how I missed out on these. Anyone run them? I thought Nokians were Nokians.

 

[SHAWZER]

Town here has the smallest RPM Tec blower that they make . 120 hp and about 5600 lbs .

Not sure why but they use it on the front of the backhoe instead of the JD 544 .

 

[jato]

mplement very well. Just substitute a Pronovost PXPL Pro or Normand bi-directional inverteds on the front of it.

I see that. It looks like a cool machine but overpriced. Putting a wide blower on it takes away its use as a sidewalk machine. And the price and lack of available service are dealbreakers to me. I can buy 4 used tractors with 600-800 hours on them for the price of one new holder, right? I'm not saying I could find 4 good drivers, but still.

If the holder really can burn around town at 25+ mph that's pretty cool. At $80-90k brand new, that would be competitive with the tractor option I think, if it can run for 2000 hours guaranteed without any major problems. But I'm new to this and I don't have a great system for getting big money out of each machine yet. Maybe if I had a way for the holder to do 3 different jobs and also be useful in the summer, I'd feel differently.

 

[Herm Witte]

I assumed bearings were weird metric like what is in the gear idler. I took that to our local bearing shop and they gave up trying to find one. The ujoints are a strange one too. Valley didnt have any. I plan on doing what you did and in the off season take pto shaft to them and make one assuming it's less than the $924 and shipping that is on the dealer site you linked to.

Spare blower is needed too!

We have found sprockets, chain, and u joints locally. State Supply for sprocket & chain. Pretty sure on u joint from Valley GR

 

[Mark Oomkes]

We have found sprockets, chain, and u joints locally. State Supply for sprocket & chain. Pretty sure on u joint from Valley GR

Have you tried getting bearings there?

 

[m_ice]

Any good bearing shop should be able to get bearing regardless if they are metric or not

 

[Ice-sage]

Thanks for this info. A few questions...
Do you buy the holders new?
How wide are the bidirectional blowers you use? I have only seen holders with 48" blowers online.
Until routes are very tight with at least 120 driveways on each, I don't see Holders as anywhere near affordable. And in my area there is no dealer, no service for them. Nearest is in Ohio I think.

Is the goal to make the job easier for the worker, even despite increased costs? I don't have the ability to do that because the business is so small. I think driving a tractor with hydro trans is insanely easy and comfortable, especially for the pay we offer

Yes we buy them brand new.

One 92 inch and the rest are 86 inch.

One machine can do 150, 2 vehicle width and 4 vehicle +length driveways in a 9-9.5 hour shift pretty easily upto about 10 inches of snow. Start adding time multipliers rapidly over 10 inches and up depending on the wetness of the snow. They blow cold powder snow like nothing though even at the highest we had at 18 inches. If you go out twice in lets say a 10 inch or higher storm with superb operators you can really fly through them even faster with density and route efficiency. Our fastest operator did 174 in a little over 9 hours and 41 minutes on an 8 inch 25° degree snow storm. He was trying to break our record though and had the perfect route set up. Most routes almost abut each other eventually around the city so faster operators or a route with less issues or traffic usually ends up joining anothers route so we all help each other to finish as expediently as we can.

I will reiterate this huge gorilla in the room again. Nothing ever beats horspower, torque and pto speed when it comes to running any of the inverteds, bi-directional inverteds or rear pull hybrids. And machine ground speed.

Yes tractors like Holders and Trackless and Avant and MultiOne/hogs are really exspensive. The manufacturers can't churn them out like Ford, Ram or Chevy trucks. Our closest Holder dealer is well over 100 miles away. We have a fulltime in house mechanic for all of our stuff from winter to summer maintenence.

Our setup and business model did not happen over night. It took well over 5 years to get to where we are now. But I had the vision of the processes and machines I knew could make it work from day one.

Absolutely finding the fastest most efficient machines and implements at all cost to make the hired helps(and mine) lives and workdays/shifts as easy as possible. This is a bigger factor than a great majority of winter maintenence companies tend to care about. Keeping the same hired help for an entire working career is one of the monumental goals of our business.

Continued....

 

[Ice-sage]

But anyway, what do you do with a front mounted blower when a driveway is in a tight downtown area, with no place to put the snow in the side or back yards? Pulling it forward with an inverted seems the best option because there's always room along the street.

But driving over the snow sucks, and I am annoyed enough about it to consider getting at least one front facing blower for next year. But it would need to be at least 72-74" wide.

I think those huge companies with dozens of tractors are buying exactly the amount of machine and blower they need. It makes no sense to over spend unless the bigger machine can do more revenue. Those little tractors cost half as much as a holder but they are maneuverable enough to function in small apartment complexes.

To me, the main benefits of a Holder, over a 60HP compact tractor, seem to be height, transport speed, and the narrower tread width. I have never driven one so I can't speak to the comfort level. If they are totally bomb-proof and require less maintenance that sounds great to me. But I'm not sure I can be okay with monthly payments at $2000 for a single machine. That is about double what we are paying for the 2 used tractors we have now.

Same principle. The bi-directional can blow going in a bit from the street than lift and drive to the garage doors or whatever and drop the gate and pull out or generally pull and blow out. No differemt than a hybrid. The chute can rotate 335° degrees left or right. You can literally blow beside the tractor or blow into the chamber if you want. You can also blow over the top and back of the machine if you must. It works this way quite well actually. More options than just the hybrid or standard inverted can accomplish.

Agreed as I stated before. If you must blow going in or if the city plow beats you to a property, the forward blowing is the most efficient way to go. Never having to drive over or pack down anything is worth its weight in gold. We charge higher rates for just this purpose. On bigger storms the city plows will bury the ends of driveways twice alot of the time as they will make passes about 3/4's of the way through a storm and then again after the snow stops. Two seasons ago we had 70 inches above average snowfall. On huge multi day storms the city plows has buried the aprons of drives in one entire storm amd afterwards a total of 5 seperate times. It was madness. But way easier with the front forward blower to go through the route multiple times just to re-clean the ends of driveways.

If we were to actually find dozens of operators and had something like 40 or 50 Holder S130's with bi-directional inverteds, we'd still go the route of the more exspensive machines and implements. Faster and producing more revenue. Easier to operate and better for the help.

Which leads me to your assesment in that same paragraph, the Holders are much smaller than even half the Horsepower equivalent John Deere or Kubota or New Holland tractors. The Holders and their equivalent type of specific friends(Avant, Multione/Hogs/Trackless) have a way more wicked turning radius capability. Huge factor there. Kind of like the Ventrac 4500 series. Reall good for tight places.

Crosses fingers as we have had no issues yet with the Holder 992's or the S130's or the X45'i's.

This business model isn't for everyone. A big enough city(probably 60,000 population and up) that isn't poor can garner this type of model well. It was all calculated risk. Can everyone do it? Absolutely not. It was all my own personal capitol at risk. My credit and my character. But I also knew if I failed, it all goes back into the gameboard box. Just like everything else in this world. Can't reap rewards without trying. And I wasn't about to let a decade of my life go to waste and did everything in my power to figure out how to get there as fast as possible.

 

[Herm Witte]

Have you tried getting bearings there?

We have not had the need to look for bearings. So I cant answer that.

 

[jato]

What scrapes better? A hybrid cyclone style with just a tivar edge on the back of the case, or a standard inverted that has a tivar edge for the blower and also a tivar edge on one of those back bars for clearing that final 10-12 inches behind the fan case?

I am hoping that upgrading to new blowers will get rid of the ice tracks we left behind in early and late season on almost every driveway this year. Which should I get? My instinct is to get the inverted with the additional back drag bar. Inv blowers are lighter than cyclones. And they seem burlier and seem to be able to sit closer to the tractor.
Thoughts?
Then the question is, does that bar need to be hydraulic w downforce?

 

[Mark Oomkes]

Hybrid scrapes far better.

The drag bar doesn't scrape for crap. According to Paul, if you add down pressure you will decrease productivity a bunch. You also need another remote.