Workshop Wednesday-Swept Away pt 1

 At work we run a few sidewalk tractors for clearing snow. The Steiner hydraulic brooms work awesome. The John Deere pto driven broom is always breaking down. Repair costs are always steep. For this reason the boss has tasked me with adapting a hydraulic broom to the JD tractor.
 The first thing I had to do was measure pump speed on the broom and output speed on the various pto's on the tractor.

 Years ago I bought this laser tach. Just apply a piece of reflective tape to a shaft or pulley and then aim the laser at it while its running. This shaft is rotating at 1039 rpm. It doesn't get used a lot but it sure is a handy tool. It will also measure feet per minute if you want to measure something like conveyor belt speed.
 It was determined that we would have to buy a pump to run off the rear pto of the tractor. The original pump will just become a spare part for our other brooms.

 This is the broom that will go on the JD tractor.

 Once I stripped the pump, tank, turntable and Steiner mount, this is what was left. The tractor mount (the black section between the green tractor and red broom) is universal. It does the lifting and angling and will handle our snow blade, snow blower and soon this broom. I just need to weld up a mount.

 This is a shot with the main pieces just tacked together. You'll notice that once again the heaviest pieces of steel are the ones I'm adding. Go big or go home I say when it comes to these kind of projects.

 The pump won't be in for a few weeks. We special ordered an electronic flow control so we could control the broom speed. Part two will show the pump mount, tank, filter and such. Stay tuned.

 Saturday is day one of my vacation. If you're interested, I'm gonna try to post daily.