Yahoo Finance I've Become a Snowplowin' Fool
I’m studying the vocabulary of snowplows. You got your “shoes” (on which the plow skids across things that shouldn’t be plowed), your power-angling versus auto-angling blade, your hydraulic or electric screw-type rams, your flexi/rigid deflectors, your locking casters, and, of course, your blade color. Me? Bumblebee motif all the way. Funny thing is, the plow isn’t even a plow. In Montana, they call it a blade, yet technically that curved dish of steel is a moldboard. You could ask a farmer.
In winter, my driveway is a 1.8-mile Olympic luge course, a galaxy of glacial cleavages that would make for a delightful doctoral dissertation. For five years, I’ve avoided the plow thing because the mountain-suitable versions start at about $3000. But now, either I buy a plow or rely on a guy with a 35-foot commercial Caterpillar grader, six sets of chains, and $300 per pass. Plus, he doesn’t like my wife.
Without Sherpas, no delivery company will risk the ascent to my house. So on a sloppy day of slush-the sky looking as if it were filtered through newspapers, and me sick in bed-my wife and the freight driver scoured our little village to locate a forklift that could deposit the plow in our pickup’s bed. Our NAPA store obliged. Price? A dozen doughnuts. Turns out my new plow weighs as much as a tax-reform bill, sinking my Toyota Tundra SR5 to lowrider status. Well, a lowrider with a 9000-pound winch.
Wrestling the plow out of the Tundra was enchanting. Hydraulic floor jack, a farm jack, ropes, blocks, and tackles sufficient to outfit the Flying Wallendas. Next came the intermezzo known as “some assembly required,” with my butt cheeks angled toward a twin-burner propane heater. Surprise! I actually got the plow looking similar, though not identical, to the photo in the instruction manual. Well, apart from that pump-o-lator doohickey cross-edgewise on the Johnson bar.
Next came electrical connections, not one of my strengths. I couldn’t locate a hole in the front firewall through which the wiring loom might poke. But I did briefly get my right arm trapped amid aluminum AC conduits and a warren of official Toyota wiring. Disengagement drew blood, which is a sentence you’ll hear only at the Pentagon or in divorce court. I should have drilled a hole for the purpose, but its inner edges would have been jagged. So I just drooped the loom over the radiator without reading even one of the manual’s 19 “Warning” notices, two “Danger” admonitions, and nine “Caution” citations. But, hey, plowing is a frigid endeavor, so how could the radiator get hot enough to melt wires? Tempting fate like that makes me feel like a rebel. The rebel nonetheless installed a fire extinguisher, because the top of the Tundra’s battery is now an entanglement of wires that, from a certain angle, resembles a Portuguese gill net.
It took two hours to adjust the blade to its specified 0.8-inch height at full droop. It’s suspended by a chain, and each link accounts for about 1.5 inches of travel-twice what I wanted. Plus, the $200 adjustable shoes aft of the blade add to the confounding calculus. More shims? Fewer? I’ve seen Formula 1 engineers dial in ride height quicker. And now my driving lights illuminate the back of the blade, so maybe I’ll drop a wheel off the north edge of my driveway, over the precipice and through the air to Grandmother’s house we go. Will skinny lodgepole pines halt the rollover of what now feels like a four-ton Toyota? Doubts are what I have.
The final instruction was to mount the lift/lower controller inside the cabin. I was low on energy, so I “mounted” it in the center console. No drilling necessary! Just the likelihood of electrical shorts smelling like burnt coffee.
So now I’m a plowing fool, although everything happens at the speed of 90-weight wood glue. And whenever I lift or lower the blade, the truck rises or squats like a senescent buffalo. You’ve heard of a world of hurt? I’m in a world of oversteer. Plus, the whole shebang juts proud of the grille maybe four feet. It’s like sitting down with elk antlers attached to your arse-doable, though it entails random stabs of pain and much tedious rearrangement. There’s also an alarming measure of squirmy-jumpy slack in the plow’s trellis of braces, and the whole apparatus in operation sounds like a junkyard falling down Grandma’s coal chute.
It’s more abuse heaped upon my poor 13,000-mile Tundra, is what it is. Smashed tailgate (an unseen ponderosa pine that magically grew behind me in four minutes), scarred flanks and nose (I sideswiped a discarded oven-my own-and knocked askew a 55-gallon drum of sand-also my own), abducted chin spoiler (eaten twice by granitic outcrops), a pinged windshield (my third in five years, call Dave at Mountain View Glass), and a truck bed that appears to have been chewed by 50 blenders on max puree.
When I trade in the Tundra, I’m just gonna have to tell the salesman: “Hurricane Katrina. Son of a bitch.”
I used to drive trucks. Now I use one.
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