A crude snowplow.

One of the uses I'd really considered with the mini excavator was using it for snow removal. The unfortunate thing though is that the poor beaten excavator I'd bought had only a straight blade (vs. a tilt blade that can pivot in the center to push dirt either left or right). So given it was only about a foot tall and maybe 6+ feet wide, it was really underutilized with snow. For pushing earth, the size is entirely adequate for the power of the machine, but snow being what it is, we are really not using the machine's full potential with such a small surface.

The plan

I had been kindly gifted some 4x4x0.25 (4" by 4" with a .25" wall) aluminum square tubing that was maybe 8 feet long. Far from a perfect plow candidate, but had plenty of rigidity to play snowplow. So my plan was to take some of the 4x.25 steel flat bar I had and fabricate some connecting pieces between the two tubes, and connect to the excavator's blade with ears on those two pieces.

Originally, I had figured I just needed some angled pieces on each side, which because of some kind of triangle magic I'd convinced myself of at the time, would create a kind of geometry that locked the two beams in parallel to eachother. This was obviously not true:

Both realizing this didnt work, and that I needed a vertical surface to run the 'connecting ears' back to the blade, I added a vertical component and fabbed it all up. I'd secured this to the bars (bars are aluminum, the connectors are steel == no welding) with bolts I put together from 1/2" allthread. And this was the skeleton, slathered in yellow cat paint.

So the question then was, what do you put on the surface? Sheet steel or sheet aluminum would be pretty damn expensive... also I didnt have that. The thinnest thing i had were 4x8 foot sheets of 1/8" steel, which I sure as hell am not going to waste on this... So it was off to home depot to grab some steel corrugated roofing. I'd cut out a 4x8 sheet of black roofing and layered it thick over the beams, sinking it in with some self-ish tapping metal screws and using the existing 1/2" bolts to also secure it. What resulted was this beauty:

Getting it mounted was pretty easy - getting the 3/4" bolt that did so easily though the ears with a pretty good fit, and all things considered it was doing its job great - pushing massive amounts of snow easily.. But a problem soon became obvious with the construction,

With the single point of connection, the plow extension can pivot on the blade. Originally, i thought that given the majority of the force on the face of the plow was below the pivot, that it was enough to prevent that tilting. I had overlooked one thing though -- by design, the blade is ever so lower than the extension (i didnt want the extension to try and dig into dirt, and also wanted to leave myself tolerance for an end being lower than the other). So what can and does happen, is some snow goes under the extension, gets pushed up by the blade, and begins pushing the bottom out. This opens up a bigger gap on the bottom, letting more snow in and this escalates quickly in the extension being tilted back into a useless piece of metal.

The solution here is easy - just add an additional fastening point lower. It doesnt need to deal with a large amount of force, so i figure I can have something thread onto the bolt stud on the plow extension right by the blade, then 'clip' onto the back of the blade.

Anyway. I'll do that... but largely this thing worked pretty well. You just had to be conscious of 'driving' the plow down into the snow. The blade float function of the excavator was key in doing this, in addition to tightening the ever loving hell out of the mounting bolts to provide more friction. But It's now a proper plow!