I took everyone's advice on here after yesterdays hospital visit and decided to take it easy today. I have been meaning to put a winch on my bulldozer, but a factory type of winch...though way better...would also cost $4000. I already had a farm tractor type of winch so I figured I minds well mount that to the back of the bulldozer. It was pretty easy, I just had to pull apart the rear end and couple a driveshaft into the transmission. Then I fabricated some brackets to act as a non-moving 3 point hitch. Then I used my log trailer to hoist the winch into position (the Dr said no heavy lifting today) into place and pinned it. Then I had to custom build a new shorter top link. After that it was just the driveshaft. Because bulldozers come with a 21 spline shaft, I used an adapter to get it down to a 540 pto spline, then hooked up the winches original pto shaft. The adapter is what cot the most money on this project: $20.00! Now I saved $4980 dollars, but it has some severe limitations. Unlike a factory winch this one will not suck a stuck dozer out of the mud, it is not big enough for that. But with dozer logging, it is frustrating to have to drive to every tree. Now I can use its 150 feet of cable to pull the felled tree to the bulldozer, then hitch the tree to the hitch of the bulldozer and make up a 5-6 tree hitch and go with that. So it is a lot more productive then what I had. It has a hitch too so I can hook my log trailer up to it and still haul that around. (BTW: the shrouds are off on the dozer because I have to install a new oil cooler for the reverser, but that will give me something to do this afternoon).
It sounds worse then it is. I had all the parts kicking around because I meant to do this for a long time, and I did take it kind of easy. I stopped for rests a few times and checked the forum out to see what was happening. I think my oil cooler is going to be a bit more tricky to mount.
I love Deere dozer. LodgedTree the doc says take it easy and you spent the day working on heavy machinery, you must have a little Aussie blood in ya I hope you had a couple of beers and admired your handy work when you were done. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Naaaaaaa....I don't drink, but I did fabricate that oil cooler bracket. It was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I have a 3 KW, 1943 era WW II surplus generator kicking around and the engine shroud was the same width as my bulldozer radiator. All I had to do was layout the cuts, cut them with a cut-off wheel and do some drilling and bolting and it was installed. Okay...so it was a lot of cuts, but it worked. My wife has taken the SUV to New Hampshire for the weekend so I am without a way to get the fittings I need to finish the job, so I am online instead. Myself...I would actually rather work on a piece of equipment then actually operate them, but sadly fixing them is the expensive part and operating them is where the money rolls in. I keep a list of all the repairs needed on every piece of equipment here and while it seems they break faster then I can improve them, in reality they do slowly improve over time.
