OlympiaFJ60

I recently installed a snow plow on the front of my ’73 FJ40. It is a nice lite weight plow made by Moose Industries in Alaska. They are no longer in business but the owner, relocated to the Portland, Oregon area, had his last stock of them for sale on Ebay last winter after we had our big snow. The plow uses a pneumatic cylinder to lift the plow and gravity to drop it and has most of the features of the larger hydraulic plows commercially available.

I was going to use a small compressor and a tank, but was worried about having enough volume for short runs and constant lifting of the plow. Next I looked at the ViAir 450 series compressor with 3 gallon tank. This would have been the easiest approach and is a very nice constant duty system, but I didn’t want spend the money. I took a quick trip to the wrecking yard and found a used compressor from a 1982 Volvo sedan. This compressor also had the P/S pump and brackets. The ’82 Volvo used a Saginaw P/S pump but has a metric fitting on the back and a wide pulley. This is the pump I used in my P/S pump conversion on a ’84 FJ60. The York compressor is also used on many American made cars and trucks, including many of the full size Jeep’s and Ford trucks.

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