Put a Swisher universal mount and scraper blade on my 500i a few days ago. Thought I'd share the experience with the rest of the kitty herders...

Tractor Supply now stocks the universal mount and the accessories to go on the mount - blade, dump bucket, and fork lift. Always nice when you can see something before you buy it. And seeing the blade sold me - all of the snow blades I'd seen before were fiberglass based. The Swisher unit is all metal, and fairly heavy gauge. Since most of my use will be pushing dirt and rocks around on a farm, this is what I was looking for.

Installation of the mount isn't that hard to do. Primary mount goes on the trailer hitch - probably the best place to put any extra loads. Two leaf springs attach to the front suspension lower a arms, but they serve only to keep the mount centered. Biggest pain was threading nyloc nuts down the long bolts they furnish to attach the quick release mounts to the lower A arms. An air wrench was invaluable.

Once the mount is on, the blade attaches to the front of the mount with a single large pin, plus a bolt for connecting the winch hook for raising and lowering the blade. The blade itself is no lightweight - probably 80 to 90 pounds - but one person can wrestle it into position. The universal mount is billed as being a 'quick release'. Call it a 'semi quick release' - the locating leaf springs come off by pulling out a single pin on each mount, but you still have to remove a large bolt that goes through the trailer hitch at the back.

And just as well it's easy to get off, because you can kiss your ground clearance goodbye. The mount, like the the other swisher equipment I own, a 44" trail mower, is tough, well built, and designed by flatlanders - no concessions made for ground clearance. It reduces your Cat's clearance from 12" down to 3". Run a trail with this guy connected, and you'll remember why you bought a Cat in the first place. Whack!

In use, the blade works as well as you could expect a light scraper blade to do. It's a couple of inches wider than the Cat, so it covers a pretty good area. Does well with gravel and loose dirt. Didn't do so well with hardpack dirt, but there's just not enough weight on the blade to expect it to dig in. No problems using the Warn to raise and lower the blade. The blade and mount does add close to 100 pounds to the front of the Cat, but the handling on my 500i didn't seem to get any worse. Keep in mind that I wasn't exactly pushing it hard, with most of the ground clearance gone. I have been using it to clear erosion on some hillside trails, and can safely state that the blade is a lot faster than trying to shovel that dirt off of the trail by hand. More fun, too.

So has it been useful? If you have a tractor with a scraper blade, you'll find the swisher blade to be interesting and occasionally useful. If you don't have a tractor with a scraper blade, you'll find it very useful. It's tough enough to push rocks and dirt, so it isn't just a snow blade. The only thing I would change is the lost ground clearance, and looking at the mount, it could be redesigned to give a lot more clearance. Same with the 44" trail mower - good mower, but if there were only some way to quickly jack it up high to get over rough trails, it would be a lot more useful. Even so, the blade and mount were very useable, you just had to be careful driving around with the mount on. Us cat jockeys are accustomed to rolling over anything that gets in our way.

And I also got a test of character - when I bought the setup at Tractor Supply, I had to take the display blade, they had sold all the boxed blades. The nice older lady at the checkout thought it was just part of the mount and was going to charge me only for the mount and not the blade (which was $237), but... naaah. I wouldn't have felt right. They'd have taken the difference out of her paycheck, and that would be like stealing from my mother.