In the past, Crow Wing County had been unable to move or use plows without hooking them to a truck or lifting them with a forklift. To simplify the process of bringing plows into the shop for repairs and moving them into storage, Austin Kubesh, Crow Wing County Highway Department shop lead worker, obtained an OPERA grant for $5,700 to develop the Loader to Plow Adapter.
The device allows the team to attach plows to its shop’s existing loader, creating a more efficient way to maneuver the plows when they’re not in use. Plus, it gives the department the advantage of being able to quickly attach and remove spare plows as needed for clearing snow from adjacent roads and parking lots.
Adapting for efficiency
Kubesh worked with Little Falls Machine Inc. to build the adapter, which converts the loader’s quick coupler to the plow’s quick coupler. The device was a perfect fit for Crow Wing County’s 930M loader and easily hooks into all of its plows. With Kubesh’s addition of loops and eyelets to contain hoses and couplers while the machine uses the loader hydraulics, the results were spot-on. “Now we can move the plows anywhere around the shop without having to use two people and a truck to line up and guide the truck into the plow,” Kubesh says.
The adapter is usually hooked up to a spare plow, but when a different plow needs to be moved or serviced, the process is simple. The adapter is hooked onto the loader, which is then driven to where the spare plow will be unhooked. Next, the coupling pin for the plow is lifted, then the chains are unhooked and the hydraulic hoses are disconnected. Once that’s complete, a driver can easily back the loader out of one plow and attach it to another.
A multiuse shop solution
After a few trial runs during snow events, the department has since implemented the device as a standard piece of snow removal equipment and an off-season shop tool—providing versatility for plows and the ability to adapt when needed. For agencies interested in building adapters of their own, Little Falls Machine can create similar devices for different loader and plow couplers with a turnaround time of roughly three months depending on their current workload, Kubesh says.
