Mounting a push leaf blower on the front of a UTV

aczlan · Dec 25, 2015

Starting a new thread to keep the other a little more on track...

daugen said:
thanks Aaron, not sure what you mean by flipping it over. My challenge is a long paved driveway where I have to blow all the leaves one way, thankfully into a woods on one side. The other side is lawn. So in order not to blow the leaves the wrong way on the first pass out I have to go through a paddock and "around the barn" to get to the end of the driveway, so I can come back in blowing leaves in the proper direction, in this case to the right of the mower/garden tractor pulling the blower. I usually use the Gravely to do this if only to give that machine some exercise. The simplest solution is a throttle cable extension of some sort, if I can reach around and throttle the blower down to idle; I don't think any of these blowers are anything other than direct drive, so no declutching. Yes I could just start the blower when I got to the end of the lane but then I'd have to wait for the engine to warm up a little. But when you mentioned "flipping over" did you mean "flipping around"? I'd love to figure out how to "flip over" one of these blowers, with a remote control like a front snowblower... or was that just one way in the front hitch receiver and the other way in the rear? Trying to picture this.

I used to work for a lawn care company and we had to blow off a bunch of paved paths that were up a fairly steep hill, we used a blower similar to one of the Little Wonder blowers shown below:

We had a golf cart and previously, someone would sit in the bed and hold the handle of the blower. The problem was that if you didn't hold it just right, the blower would start wobbling back and forth. That would usually end up with the blower on its side and once the guy didn't let go fast enough and he twisted his wrist.
The solution was a T shaped piece of 2"x2" 1/4" tube that went into the front receiver hitch and cradled the back axle of the blower. We then used a tension strap to hold the handle to the brush guard of the of the golf cart:

That would probbaly work on the front of your RTV.

Aaron Z

daugen · Dec 25, 2015

got it, thanks Now how to design directional air control when the motor only spins one way...although I suppose one could have a sluice gate arrangement where the output is simply blocked off or directed down.
Like reverse thrusters on a jet or the reverse arrangement in a jet pump powered boat.

aczlan · Dec 25, 2015

Two properly sized PVC 90s (or a 90 and a tee) one them with a cap on it with a cutout to match your square output?

Aaron Z

groundcover · Dec 25, 2015

Put a JRCO Blowerbuggy on my zero turn, on and off with two pins, works slick as a bean !

chim · Dec 26, 2015

I already have a 3-point leaf blower I fabbed a while back, but bought a walk-behind leaf blower a few months ago just because it was in good shape and cheap. It works OK but I expected the walk-behind to have more oomph than it does. When I checked the specs on walk-behind blowers it looks like most are around 2500CFM. The 3-point blower uses the fan from a 10 to A/C unit. I calculated the sheave sizes to get approximately the same RPMs it had in the unit it came from when run at PTO speed. It moves roughly 4000CFM or so and blows leaves farther then the walk-behind.

Leaf Blower Video by jim_miller7 | Photobucket

Bill Hoffman · Dec 26, 2015

Jim,
any chance of seeing a more detailed photo of your 3pt blower?
Looks really interesting.
Thanks

daugen · Dec 26, 2015

I have a psychological problem with using 50hp to run a 8-10hp fan.
I'd probably get over it if the blower worked really well...

and I was sitting in a nice clean cab not sucking up leaf dust

chim · Dec 26, 2015

The blower is half buried in a shed but I'll see if I can get a picture or two tomorrow. I usually run it with the small open station Ford 1210 and that makes it a fairly compact rig. It blows hard enough to keep the debris away from the tractor most of the time.