Oshkosh SnoGo Cutting Back The Road Sides in Houghton, MI

[vanapplebomb]

Filmed widening the roads on my way back from class this past week. What a fun piece of noisy machinery to watch.

[thedirtydutchman]

Now thats cool!

[vanapplebomb]

Aren't they though?

We have a few of them up here that we break out during the winter. Some of them self contained like this, and others attach to front end loaders. When it's snowing they plow the snow off to the sides of the road with road graders, or county plow trucks if there isn't much accumulation. Then when the snow stops they divert their resources to cutting back the edges of roads, like in the video. Move snow when it's snowing, and REmove snow when it stops.

At night when the traffic volume is lower, they come by with road graders and push the snow into the middle of the streets. Then they drive a dump truck right next to the snow blower and load the snow into the dump truck as they drive down the road. When it's full, they truck the snow outside the city and dump it in a couple big piles. They usually have a few trucks lined up so they can keep the process moving. It's really fun to watch. It's a never ending 24 hour job.

The big SnoGo machines are even more fun to watch when they really crank them up and clear fresh powdery snow. Man does that stuff fly.

[vanapplebomb]

They got two engines in them. The engine up front is the drive engine for the wheels and the rear engine powers the snow blower. If I remember correctly, the drive engine is a cummins and the blower engine is a cat engine, same one the old D8 dozers had. I'm not sure about these old dinosaurs, but I know the newer ones they have mounted on the front end loaders can move 2500 TONS of snow per hour. Thats pretty dang impressive. Still pretty cool that they maintain the old SnoGo's from the 1940's though. Guess they don't make 'em like they used to.

[thedirtydutchman]

A guy in allegan built one. He said it would through snow 100ft! Had a massive Detroit diesel on the back to power the blower. Not really sure what on earth he actually did with it but it was cool!

[vanapplebomb]

Good old two stroke Detroit? Awesome!

These guys will definetly do 100' with fresh powder if they crank them up to cut the roadsides back, but they limp them along for slush and hardpack because that stuff is really hard on the machinery.

[thedirtydutchman]

Im not 100% sure what detroit was on it(this was like 10 years ago). But is was a cool rig for sure! The guy build all kinds of cool stuff. He actually build his own engine dyno for his land speed racer.