V bar chains on pavement

I snowblowed about 4 inches of snow today with my B2601 on my super steep paved driveway. I have a spreader on the back with about 400 pounds of sand in it and when I was on my way back up the 200’ diveway, in 4wd, I came to a standstill. Next thing I knew, I was going backwards down the driveway. With a lot of puckering and some fancy driving skills, I managed not to kill myself and made it down, in reverse. I have a bx5455 blower on the front and loaded tires but I got the feeling that all that weight in the spreader made my front end light. Either way, I can never let this happen again. I want to get chains for the rear and I want to make sure that they work on ice and snow.

I’ve done some searching online and saw that someone had V bar chains on an M series Kubota, which is much heavier than my tractor, and they said it didn’t damage their paved drive while snowblowing. I was hoping someone else had some experience with V bar chains and could confirm this. I figure my tractor is about 3000 pounds with everything on it, including me. I’m thinking, as long as I don’t spin, the V bars shouldn’t sink into my frozen driveway. I can stand a little damage but I don’t want to tear it to pieces. Any thoughts?
This picture was taken on the gravel section of the driveway and a summer picture of the driveway.

85Hokie said:

Had the same thing happen to me last year - BX, loaded R4 tires, 4WD, no chains, and going uphill on asphalt, stopped and started to slide back - not a good feeling at all!

I would think, Like you mentioned - if you do NOT spin, you should be fine with chains. Your picture does not do justice to what you describe - rarely does a picture describe the sensation of "pucker factor"

Your drive is a lot steeper than what we see!

on another note - I too have chains now......double link....looking for a little white stuff.......I said little!

Click to expand...

The picture definitely doesn’t do it justice. Near the top, when driving up it I. A vehicle, it almost feels like you can launch into the air. I measured the incline before and I think it was around 14 degrees. It’s bad enough to have scared the crap out of me one too many times.

I’m leaning toward getting these https://www.tirechain.com/Tire-Chains-Studded-Tractor.htm I’m pretty sure that my little tractor doesn’t have enough weight to drive those studs into the frozen pavement. I live in upstate New York where we get over 100 inches of snow a year, so I’m sure I will get plent of use from them.

This is exactly the type of first hand information I was hoping for. I guess now it’s just a matter of picking out something else.

I decided to go with these, without the v bars. https://www.tirechain.com/DUO-LADDER-COMBINATION.htm

They should show up on Wednesday. We have a pretty big storm coming so I will get to try them out soon. I will check back and let everyone know how the do.

So I got my chains on today. They work great and don’t seem to be leaving any marks in the pavement. I was able to crawl up the driveway, with the blade on the snowblower digging up the packed snow and ice, and never lost traction once. I couldn’t make it up at all last night, even with the snowblower off the ground. I grooved my tires last year but that didn’t seem to be enough.

Now for the bad part. First, the tractor rides like a tank now. Anything faster than a crawl, rocks the tractor pretty bad. I wouldn’t even consider putting it in mid gear.

The chains were WAY to long when I got them. I’m not even sure why they ask you what size tires you have if they can’t make an attempt at sizing the chains. It was a huge pain in the ass to size them. I had to remove cross bars and move one cross bar to another link. There is a large space between the duo-ladder chains, where the chains connect. There should be a single cross bar in between the duo-ladders but there isn’t any room for one.

Other than that, the chains seem to be very high quality and work very well. I used 6 cheap ratchet straps to tension them.