Yes, I love snow. I love snow. I have been wanting to make this video for literally weeks now, and we've got about three inches and I can get out and finally do it. A couple things about the snow. This inverted snowblower is awesome. I got this beautiful rooster tail of snow out here behind me. With this light snow, I can almost run in high range. It clears snow as fast as what I can drive it. Yeah, this is high. I'm showing more snow. I want you to go on this path. The setup is nice. I really like the adjustment, being able to change the direction using my third function rocker, except for one thing. The spout turns over 180 degrees, so I've covered myself with snow here once or twice by over-rotating it.
I am surprised. Sometimes when you get into big snowblowers like this, this is a 60 inch, they need to have enough snow going into the intake to get a nice rooster tail going out of them, right? You need that snow pushing into the back of it in order to get the flow going, push it out the chute. This seems like it's big enough that it does a good job. I sometimes worry, like when you get a light snowfall like this, that snowblowers aren't always the right implement, right? They're fantastic for the heavy snows, but sometimes for the light ones I think sometimes I prefer blades. But I'm pretty happy with how this is working.
I personally love snow, an avid skier, and I have decades of great memories of getting out and playing in the snow with equipment, whether it's out clearing the driveway with a tractor or out with my RTV or four-wheeler or something out pulling the kids around outside with a sled. Equipment and snow for me have always gone hand in hand, and it's something that I really enjoy personally. There's nothing better for me than to get out there and do work like this. I love it. I do appreciate these Arillian work lights out here like this. See, I can take these and adjust them back and forth, so I can see what I'm doing. If you see here, this is what my headlights look like without the work lights, and when you bring your bucket up, looks like all you can see is the back of your bucket, right? You lose all that. Now, when it's just of the ground here a little bit, it does work, but having an extra work light makes all the difference in the world in how well you can see. On my other side, I have this other one set in the back so I can keep my snowblower running if I look back behind me.
I've got the skid shoes maybe set a notch too high. I didn't want to scrape my driveway up, but I'm leaving probably about half an inch of snow there. One of the things that I wanted to see with this inverted blower was whether the tractor driving over top of it was going to cause a problem and get it not scraping clean. I'm going to head back here to the garage and adjust my skid shoes up a notch so that we get that cutting edge running against the driveway and see what it does
One of the big benefits to these styles of blowers is going to be the fact that I can still keep my loader on here. Normally the plows haven't gone past here yet, but because I still got the bucket on the front, I can go and use my loader and clean out that wash from the plows at the end of the driveway and still have my snowblower here on the rear for the longer passes. I do appreciate having this inverted and just driving forward.
I do not have a hydraulic or a remote on my tractor, so I have this plumbed up to my third function now. You're definitely not going to go and operate a grapple in a snowstorm, right? So I've got two couplers I can swap with my hydraulic third function and use that rocker switch up there with the loader stick in order to operate the rotator for the snowblower. I like that. It's slick. Having that control up here on the joystick is really smart. It works well.
The naysayers for this thing are always telling you, "Why do you want to drive over top of your snow before you hit it with your snowblower? Isn't that stupid? You're just going to pack it down, and then your snowblower's not going to pick it up." Well, take a look. Where all my tire tracks and everything are, you don't see any of that. It's taken this off really nicely, and that shoe is set just about perfectly. I'm not really marring my driveway up super, super hard. In fact, if anything packs it down, I dust all this out of the way, you can see here where my skid shoe was. I don't see a whole lot. If I keep moving towards the middle here, maybe there's a little bit of tire. That's hardly leaving anything left. It's really doing a nice job of picking it up, so I don't see that driving over the top of the snow before getting to the snowblower is too much of a detriment.
Okay, now we go up here where the drive ends, up to the garage door, so I can take my loader bucket, move up here to the edge, drop my bucket down, and then just drop it in the float, do a little bit of back drag in order to pull that snow away from the garage door. Now a front bound snowblower maybe is a little bit easier in this regard. You can get perpendicular to your garage door. You can make a pass, but I guess [inaudible] but most of the time you're going to need to make some passes like this one, back drag away from your doors
We're going to talk about this a little bit later, but the ones of you with a sharp eye are going to notice the backside of my loader bucket there, there are two hydraulic accumulators. It's just something that you don't often see on compact tractors. It's actually an ag tractor-type feature. Those accumulators are going to let that loader sponge a little bit now. Sponging is not desirable if you're going to be doing dirt work and stuff, the last thing you want is a spongy loader. Actually, the intended use for those is if you're transporting stuff, like in an ag application you're rolling round bales and stuff. Having that little bit of sponge there in the loader really makes the machine ride a lot smoother.
I'm finding times, though, that I actually like it for other things too, when I'm back dragging and I don't want to be in float. When you're in float during snow like this, you oftentimes lose a lot of your front traction, especially if you're pushing forward, or if I'm in float and I've got that thing pushed down to the ground, I want a little bit of pressure so I pop it into float and then take it out. You'll see when I back up, my motor boots still wiggle a little bit. That's the accumulators taking up some of the pressure, so interesting that I'm finding that I actually like those accumulators for snow removal. Now that I've got everything removed from the length of my garage doors, I'm now going to take my snowblower back over. Check my spout so it's not going to shoot me in the back of the head, and make some passes here now to clean up that snow and blow it away from the house.
So many of you seem to appreciate when I screw things up and am willing to talk about it. I was coming back in here to the garage and realized that my blower was no longer running, and looked back behind me, and sure enough, I could see the shaft spinning but nothing coming out, right? You figure I probably knocked a shear pin out. This actually has two shear pins on it. The first place that I looked was back up here on the PTO shaft. Now, you're pretty used to seeing shear pins there, right? That's the one that's going to knock out for the fan, but there's a second one on this. Back on the rear of the unit, there's a service cover right here that allows you to get back into that spot right there on the shaft. You can see how that spins free right now. I need to put a bolt back in that hole, so pretty nice. I can get back to the grease zerks and everything on these pulleys down here on the end as a really quick and simple place to get to the shear pin. I know when I knocked it out. I picked up some dirt and stuff back in the driveway.
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