Allow rear snow blower to pivot?

[PILOON]

Hello hube2,

Just take the skids you have to a welding shop and have them copied and made 4 inches wide and have 16 inches of the skis thick flat stock on the intake end(front end and make sure the ski is curved on both ends to prevent digging in in either direction making sure the rear end of the ski is only 8 inches longer than the cross auger housing to prevent possibly piercing a rear tire.

Not precise, just dumb, numb, and it works as long as you use fine thread bolts and fine thread nylock nuts and washers to secure it.

That is what I did.

Oversized double ended skids. (skis)
About 12-13ins long X 2 1/2 wide on a 60 inch blower.
No more gravel raking 4 me!

Now for a pivot it would need to be on a central axis i.e. two 'plates' facing each other with the pivot point as close as possible to the PTO shaft.
It would end up similar to the big snow plow rigs that are on highway plows.
I would suggest too complex for CUT blowers.

BUT
What might work would be vertical slots (like 2") instead of holes (ball ends) on the 2 lift arms that would allow 3-4 inch movement up/down to compensate for uneven road beds.
Having seen graphs of U-joint operating ranges I'd suggest this would work just fine as to U-joints.
Problem might be wear from friction in the slots due to the vertical motions but I'd think that could be worked around.

Or to otherwise describe, replace the ball ends with vertical slots.

 

[Cycledude]

Like other's said....get some good skids:

Snowblower Skids For Sidewalks and Gravel Drives

Thanks for posting that link it was very helpful ! I might be attempting to build some better skid shoes for my 72 inch Meteor rear blower.

 

[hube2]

Thanks all, considering that there were risks I've decided that this was a bad idea.

I doubt I will ever do anything about leveling off the property, I live on the side of a hill and differences in grade come with the territory. I actually already had better skids but I put the OEM skids back on because I could not get them set at the right depth without cutting off the bottom corners of the blower box flange. One of the things I did since my comment was to go out in the cold and take care of that and the blower now rides up the hills much easier without digging in. Much improved but even set as low as I can I leave quite a bit of snow in the dips. I can live with that.

 

[leonz]

I am glad that we were able to help you with this issue. A broken snow blower for the user is a bad snow blower that
cannot do anything other than be a rear dead weight if it is broken.