Quick question

Sounds like a good running machine to me!

What the purpose of the snow Ramp.
As for the black smoke my 5T doesn't turn the dark smoke ever under any condition but it does get heavier on the hard push.
Good pictures.

On my 2T when its pushing hard i never see any black smoke coming out the exhuast. When i lug it down almost to stall i still makes barly any smoke.....

Hi, Kenmcal.
My understanding is that black smoke is a sign of unburned fuel, which is why it shows up when air filters are dirty and reducing the flow of air to the engine. It is also the reason why early turbo-ed engines gave out that huge cloud of black smoke when the engine was building up revs from idle or near idle.

Many, if not most, un-turbo-ed engines, if properly tuned and well maintained, do not normally tend to give out much black smoke. The first diesel dozer that I operated was a 2T D4 and it didn't give out much smoke at all once it warmed up.

I don't know a whole lot about dealing with snow and ice, not living in an area where we get much of it, but would coating that throttle linkage and/or the floor plates with a heavy grease help to stop the linkage getting bound up by the ice build-up?

Are you planning on doing an Eivel Kneivel from that snow ramp?

The old naturally aspirated ones did not seem to produce a lot of visible carbon, soot or whatever it is, on those overhead ridge beam dozer kits, the stack always coats the section of the beam above the stack, stack itself will have a thin layer of soot, but I've always taken notice of how clean these appear to run, Caterpillar boasted about this at some time in the past, noting that long running older era engines could keep up or be tuned to keep up with later emission standards, someone may have that ad and be able to post it here. The D-8800 in my D7, will push some black smoke at start up, more white, but not yet warmed up, unburnt fuel. Realizing that these engines were also designed to run on low grade fuels, like some older types of heating oil and similar, you wonder how clean those fuels burned.

Hi kenmcal,
Classic snow moving scenes there😊 😊
Seems to be running just fine.....those D4400 governors seem to be a little snappier then some other models.....so the load matching might be a little quicker. Just an observation😊