Well, a new-to-me groomer. The former operator left the club so we needed to shuffle around a little and I drew the short straw. Fortunately we had been training another operator and it made more sense to put him in the ASV which parks with the Pisten Bully. That way if he had trouble Ben would be close by to help.
Anyway this beast is a 1989 Tucker Sno-Cat 2000.
It's got a Cummins 6BT like a Dodge pickup and as you can see, 4 tracks.
I've heard it called "Farm equipment with aspirations" and that's not wrong. It's an interesting beast but not without issues. The drivetrain is really simple, the 6BT mates to a 3 speed automatic transmission and single speed transfer case. The axles are, I think, Spicer truck rear axles that pivot at the centerline of the axle. So the tracks are firmly attached to the axle and the whole axle moves. Both axles pivot so its effectively "four wheel (track) steer". This one in particular has something wrong with it and steers really hard at the limits, it also doesn't seem to steer as far as our other machine. I don't know what the issue is but its annoying.
I had terrible trouble with it icing up early on. The output of the fuel tank is right in the very bottom of the tank and I think it had some water that settled there. That water froze and in cold temps the machine would just barely run. The first time I took it out it took half an hour or more to get it warmed up enough to go out. Fortunately that run seems to have cleared the blockage. Before the second run I changed the water separator and fuel filter and it ran fine.
Driving is an odd experience, the automatic transmission has its work cut out for it making shifts with all the drag of the machine. A few times I've been fooled into thinking that we were losing power when in reality I just needed the machine to downshift. The 4 tracks are *relatively* nimble as long as you're going forward, it'll slalom fairly well. The 4 track system is nowhere near as nimble as either of the 2 track machines we have though and it's REALLY slow in reverse. I plowed snow with it one day and it took forever. I'd have been better off getting the ASV started, waiting while it warmed up and then plowing...
The most positive thing is that it's fast. It'll pull a pretty good load of snow at 10mph where the ASV can only do serious work in slow gear, 5-6mph. This is important for the run the Tucker is assigned which goes from Winchendon, MA to Barre, MA. The first trip was down and back and took something like 9 hours. That one we had to open a bunch of gates and of course deal with the machine being frozen. The second run I only went one way and made it in about 4.
Angie went on the second run with me and said she liked the Tucker more than the ASV. I'll put that down to it having been years since she was in the ASV...
