The reason: In mid 2002, my fiance and I decided to have a house built. With this, I knew that living in Western New York, we would be getting snow. And possibly, lots of it. I had done research in the past, and new that several manufacturers made plows for a Jeep Cherokee, specifically, Meyer(6’6″), Western(6’6″), Blizzard(6’8″), and Snoway(6’8″). With this, I looked into pricing for these plows new. After doing this research, I knew I wanted to try and find a used one since they were priced between $2000-$3000. I figured if I could stay around $1000, that was pretty much the price of a snow blower.

After deciding on used, I kept my eye on eBay and the local paper. I came across a bunch that were over priced, or didn’t have all of the pieces. I saw a nice Western 6’6″ plow, but the guy was asking $1600, but didn’t have the truck mount ($500) or any of the truck-side wiring ($200). So now this plow was $2300, when I could get a new one for $2500. I also found a newer Snoway plow for sale locally. This one also didn’t have the truck mount or truck-side wiring. I called the local Snoway dealer, but never felt like I was getting an honest answer. Every time I called, I was told it was just better to buy a new plow, etc. When I told them that wasn’t an option, they would be wishy-washy. It was like no one wanted to look up the prices on the peices. When I did get someone to look them up, they would give “about” prices. “This piece is about $45.” I could never figure this out, was not the price listed? And since they were the only dealer in town, I decided to stay away from that plow.

The Purchase: After some searching, I found a used Meyer Max 6’6″ plow listed in the Buffalo News. I called that day, and looked at it that night. The plow was in good shape, and about two years old. They guy that owned it used to work at a Meyer distributor, so he always took good care of it. The only thing the guy didn’t have was the truck-side mount. He had the blade, pump, wiring, two controllers, two solenoids, two sets of headlight wiring, two sets of controller wiring harnesses, and two sets of quick releases pins. The only thing I would have to buy was a mount. I called around to several places, and found that Jakala’s Truck Equipment in Amherst had the best price, and were pretty close (I work down the street from them.)

The Install: The one thing that kind of sucked was having to take the grille guard and winch off of my truck to mount the plow. But off it went. It was either that, or shovel the driveway. Nahhh. Installing the mount wasn’t really that big of a deal. Everything pretty much used existing holes. The only drilling I had to do was to make a hole through the from a little bit bigger for a bolt to slip through. The mount went on the truck in about an afternoon. Most of this was taking the bumper and endcaps off and then putting them back on. Now that the mount was installed, it was on to the wiring. The guy scratched down a wiring diagram on a piece of paper when I bought it.

Once the mount was in place, I just kind of hooked all of the wires up loosely just to see if it worked. But nothing happened. After some troubleshooting, and dumb luck, I found out that the solenoid had to be grounded. Ok, so maybe the guy left that out of his wiring diagram. Once that was taken care of, I was set to move forward with the wiring install. This wasn’t that big of a deal since there was really only about five wires to hook up. The one pain in the a$$ part was getting the wire for the controller into the cabin of the truck. The holes I have through the firewall weren’t all that big, but a litte bit of forcing took care of that. So now the plow was all installed, and working. The last thing to hook up were the plow headlights.

Headlight Upgrade: The plow came with Arrow Sno-Laser 2 headlights. I wasn’t really all that impressed with these since I have IPF Magic-Js. Their output seemed like regular headlights where I was much more used to the brighter / whiter light. With this, I decided to upgrade to the Meyer Night Saber lights. I ordered these through the web from Central Parts out of IL. When these came in, they had another sets of wires and a diagram. Overall, they weren’t too bad to install. It took a little bit of hit and miss to figure out how to wire them inline with my IPF lights and its harness.

How Does it Work? Overall, the plow works great. We have had a bunch of smaller snowfalls this year. Mostly a few inches at a time. However, the one night we did end up getting about a foot. At the street, from the town plows going by, we had about 2-2.5 feet. I backed out of the garage, out into the street. And then backed the truck into the garage, dropped the blade, and pushed it out to the street. The truck had no problems at all doing this. I was surprised at how easily the truck moved the snow. After doing the whole driveway, I was surpised at the pile of snow in the street. I was kind of half wondering if the truck was going to be able to push all of that. But again, the truck moved it effortlessly. After doing my own driveway, I ended up doing quite a few of the neighbor’s driveways.

Click any of the pictures below to enlarge: