Thrag
5020
After the couple of feet of snow pictured in my posts above, another foot and a half of heavy wet snow fell. It wasn’t as deep as the earlier pictures, but more dense. I don’t so much have a driveway, but over a thousand feet of road that winds up a hillside. I spent about seven hours over three days working my inadequate snowblower to maintain a car sized path.
There’s something wrong with me because I loved almost every minute of it. Even when the wind shifted and hosed me down with the snow I had just thrown. I love the snow. I honestly missed it when I lived on the coast. I had to travel back to SF this week to deal with some stuff and I’m totally bummed I had to leave my winter wonderland.
I do love the winter wonderland look, and the brief feeling of returning to a wilderness at the mercy of nature that lets me arm myself and do battle, whether it’s shoveling or bravely making an emergency run for something we need. But otherwise it’s a pain in the ass and after the roads are cleared the dirty snow looks ugly and I just want it to all melt away.
We don’t get enough snow here to justify getting a snowblower, but I really want one. I really like my leaf blower which I got in 2020. I had no idea they were so versatile and so much fun to use. I bet a snowblower would be just as much fun.
Some years back a client of ours chopped off all his fingers using a snow blower (they were re-attached.) No, I do not know how he managed to get his fingers cut off.
Jesus. I can only guess he was reaching into the mechanism for some reason.
If I get one it will be electric. I do not want gas anything. The cordless devices have come a long way.
I use the Ryobi battery-powered thrower. For anything up to 6-8 inches it works fine. Takes two of the batteries, but it clears my roughly 40 foot driveway plus the sidewalk on a single charge.
I have some other Ryobi stuff so that would be the way I’d go. Really, though, we can an entire winter here and not get enough to snow to need one. We can get dumped on sometimes too, though.
Rule of thumb (heh) only have the snow blower running when you are standing at the controls.
Strange, there’s a dead man’s switch on mine, so you HAVE to hold the handles at the top or it shuts off. I do have an electric, so maybe gas powered ones just keep running and cuttin’ off fingers.
Edit: holy fuck don’t google too far into snowblower dead man’s switch. There’s some real unfortunate stuff in the world.
All those Tim Taylor types out there patch across dead-man switches, because they aren’t manly.
My electric mower has a dead man’s switch too. I like it. It’s a safety feature.
It’s not called a dead-man’s switch because it represents a good time, you know…
— Alan
I had to deal with this driveway situation on Tuesday morning. It was way deeper than my snowblower so I had to push and shove to get one trench, then slice off a few inches at a time as I went up and down just so I could keep it rolling. The problem with our narrow stone wall driveway is that there’s no place to blow the damn snow.
Then my wife had to climb in the passenger side to drive it backwards so I could clear this mess.
Took me about three hours to do an okay job, then a couple hours later it snowed three more inches. RUDE.
Thrag
5033
My blower has handle grips, left for the auger right for the wheels. I have to admit that I put a spring clamp on the auger control as my hand gets tired after a couple of hours. I set it on the end of the handle so I can knock it off instantly if need be. Of course I never put my hands or anything else near the chute or front of the machine when the thing is running. There’s a little tool that attaches to the hood for digging packed slush out of the chute.
After this storm I’m eyeing an upgrade to one of these tracked Hondas:
I’m afraid to ask how much that costs.
Thrag
5036
They do make giant snowblower attachments for tractors and skid steers which come close.
Does it have a flamethrower attachement? Please tell me it has a flamethrower attachement.
Nesrie
5038
Looks like something that belongs in the Fargo movie.
