47" Snowblower Chute Rotation Mod -Revisited

Dale1995 · Jan 7, 2010

I tried this on my 47' snowblower, and yes it did give me more rotation of the chute, unfortunately I also observed that having the cable wrapped around the smaller pulleys also placed more stress on the center pivot pulley, mine actually loosened up twice, even after I had torqued it up good and tight!

The center pulley has a lot of stress applied to it when the chute is being turned and I could actually see that it was bending the steel plate that it was mounted too. So before it broke that I removed that setup. It seems that the extra wraps of cables rubbing on each other seem to create undue forces that this blower setup is not designed to handle....Thats my 2 cents worth. So if you do this, keep an eye out for this problem. I would like to have a chute rotator system that does not require cable, guess I would have to redesign the bottom of the chute and find some way to rotate the assembly with the hydraulic cylinder

turbo36 · Jan 7, 2010

Dale1995 said:
I tried this on my 47' snowblower, and yes it did give me more rotation of the chute, unfortunately I also observed that having the cable wrapped around the smaller pulleys also placed more stress on the center pivot pulley, mine actually loosened up twice, even after I had torqued it up good and tight! The center pulley has a lot of stress applied to it when the chute is being turned and I could actually see that it was bending the steel plate that it was mounted too. So before it broke that I removed that setup. It seems that the extra wraps of cables rubbing on each other seem to create undue forces that this blower setup is not designed to handle....Thats my 2 cents worth. So if you do this, keep an eye out for this problem. I would like to have a chute rotator system that does not require cable, guess I would have to redesign the bottom of the chute and find some way to rotate the assembly with the hydraulic cylinder

It does not take a lot of force to rotate the chute but if you make the cables too tight they work against them selves, if you read my post again you will see that I say to leave some slack.

Dale1995 · Jan 7, 2010

perhaps you are right, but I didn't snug up the cable too tightly....and I could still see a lot of stress. Maybe I will try it again on my new 54" blower

I wonder if you were to replace the small single groove pulley with a double groove pulley of the same diameter, if this would help eleviate some of the cable wear?

turbo36 · Jan 7, 2010

Dale1995 said:
perhaps you are right, but I didn't snug up the cable too tightly....and I could still see a lot of stress. Maybe I will try it again on my new 54" blower I wonder if you were to replace the small single groove pulley with a double groove pulley of the same diameter, if this would help eleviate some of the cable wear?

Did you make up new longer cables and run the cable in the pulley and not on the bushing?