Plows on Lawn Tractors?

[Mowerpan]

Hey alrite this is a little different. We have a John Deere 318 garden tractor, used to tow a trailer and stuff. Right now we have a single stage snow thrower on the front. This stupid thing plows good if the snows perfect otherwise it sucks because it's a single stage. I hate the blower also because the snow goes right in my face. For our driveway and the cemetary my dad manages a plow would better serve our purpose and we bought a plow of a cub cadet, a manual lift one and I was gonna modify the mounts to work. I don't want manual lift tho so how would I rig up the hydraulic lift, I'm not gonna mess with angling because the tractor only has one set of front hydraulics for lifting and lowering. Do I just buy a dual hydraulic cylinder and would this work with the tractor hydraulic pump, or would i need to get a tiny cylinder like the blower has.

And I don't want to use a chain or anything on this, so I'd prolly just have always on down pressure that i'd manual set with the lift handle. Otherwise how would I do a dual hydraulic cylinder and not always have down pressure. The plow doesn't weight that much so I do want something to keep it down so it scrapes better, or should I just not bother.

[Got Snow?]

i'll take a stab at this......

you would need at least a single acting cylinder to raise it, and a valve to control the flow to the cylinder. a valve with a "float" setting will allow the plow to follow the contour of the surface. if you have aux hydraulics on you tractor it shouldn't be too hard to rig up, even one to angle shouldn't be hard either. you could use a double action cylinder one one side......you' need another valve too.

you could mount the lift cylinder undernieth too avoid fabbing up a head gear.

you may need to calculate the piston size to match pump flow/pressure and plow wieght.

if you don't have aux hydraulics, your probably better of to rig up an electric winch from an ATV to raise it.......

[Mowerpan]

There is auxillary hydraulics on the front 2 ports and there both connected to a raise/lower handle do i'd hafta use a dual acting cylinder that's how the blower cylinder is. Ya see with the tractor hydraulics there is no float, so I guess I'd get some nice ghetto downpressure system, and if I gotta falt tire in the front it'd prolly lift the tractor up with the blade lol. Right now were just rigging it up with manual lift but hopefully this summer we'll rig up a hydraulic cylinder, the way the blower works is one end of the cylinder only goes so far out, so it puts the blower on the ground the notch on the blower goes lower then the cylinder will come out so that's how it "floats"