As promised, here are a couple of pictures of my latest snowblower project.
Took these last night, thus the lousy quality of the pics.
I picked this up for $75 from a guy that had it at one of his rentals, so you can imagine how it was treated. It's a bit rusty on the auger housing and the drive axle, but all in all it's in decent shape for a 24 year old machine.
When I picked it up, it didn't run, the axle was stuck in powershift mode, and most of the running gear was stiff from sitting for a couple of years. A quick carb soak and rebuild, head removal for decarboning, a new head gasket, a check of the valve clearance, and she was up and running quite well. With these Tecumsehs, as long as the rod hasn't gone through the block, I can get them running pretty cheap.
With a good greasing, I got the axle back into the regular position and am able to push it around easily in neutral. It has actual gears as opposed to a friction disk setup, so this thing is a tank. The impeller cable was broken, so I don't know how well it will blow snow yet. It also had nothing left of the impeller bearing, so I had to seperate the auger housing from the frame to replace that. Not too hard to do, so I'll see if I can take it all apart again this summer and repaint it and the auger drum and impeller. Since the wheels are rust welded on the axle, I'll probably pull that too and see if a press can seperate them. I'd like to blast and paint the rims as they are really looking bad with rust.
As soon as the cable arrives, it will be put back together and the muffler can be put on with the one good bolt for now, and we'll see how well it chucks the snow.
I promised my wife this would be the last project blower for this year. There's always next year.
Took these last night, thus the lousy quality of the pics.
I picked this up for $75 from a guy that had it at one of his rentals, so you can imagine how it was treated. It's a bit rusty on the auger housing and the drive axle, but all in all it's in decent shape for a 24 year old machine.
When I picked it up, it didn't run, the axle was stuck in powershift mode, and most of the running gear was stiff from sitting for a couple of years. A quick carb soak and rebuild, head removal for decarboning, a new head gasket, a check of the valve clearance, and she was up and running quite well. With these Tecumsehs, as long as the rod hasn't gone through the block, I can get them running pretty cheap.
With a good greasing, I got the axle back into the regular position and am able to push it around easily in neutral. It has actual gears as opposed to a friction disk setup, so this thing is a tank. The impeller cable was broken, so I don't know how well it will blow snow yet. It also had nothing left of the impeller bearing, so I had to seperate the auger housing from the frame to replace that. Not too hard to do, so I'll see if I can take it all apart again this summer and repaint it and the auger drum and impeller. Since the wheels are rust welded on the axle, I'll probably pull that too and see if a press can seperate them. I'd like to blast and paint the rims as they are really looking bad with rust.
As soon as the cable arrives, it will be put back together and the muffler can be put on with the one good bolt for now, and we'll see how well it chucks the snow.
I promised my wife this would be the last project blower for this year. There's always next year.
