I will add that I have to keep my blower fed with snow. It will not blow a thin skim of snow unless I am really moving. I suspect the gap has a large role in that.
I came across this thread and I know its long gone so apologies extended. Maybe its relevant now anyways to a few as the snow's upon us again. I find with my blowers that they do work much better when their throats are filled with snow. At that point, you have to tailor your speed to get the right results. Too fast you are pushing snow and it builds up first at the sides and then over the top if you really are going too fast. Best seems the speed that has the paddles of the blower making a throbbing noise as you go. Seems that when I hear that, then I know my blower is working efficiently. You can tell cause its blowing the snow the greatest distance and everything its being fed is being thrown out.
Now... on the snowblower performance. It appears from what people are saying that the luck now blowers blow well. I picked up an old Inland 3pt blower several years ago, against my better judgement having not researched it, but the guy who I bought the tractor from [ Simplicity 9523 23hp 2 cyl Diesel ] had the blower and my dad was like "heh, he has the blower right here he'll sell you, > JUST DO IT! " . Well, I did just do it. And with high hopes I might ad no lie. So we get our first snow some 4 years ago right? It's a heavy wet half melted pile of dung. I take my new/used tractor out, all excited you know. Try it out on this and the f*$&er us barely moving the snow out the chute!!! BOY, WAS I DISAPPOINTED! Even on the neighbors paved driveway across the street. I would set the blower down, engage the PTO, start backward and the blower would literally push the snow back in a sheet about 3 inches thick until the weight of the tractor was exceeded by the weight of the snow plate I was pushing, and then the tractor would just sit there and spin. LOL I can at least laugh about this now. fwiw
So I set about researching how to fix this. First was some proper snow. I thought, heh, it's the wet snow that's beating me here. So I try it out on powder snow a couple weeks later and I am getting like 7-15ft throw distance. That is the outside of the stream, not the inside. Rats! It's no lie that I went round and round with this thing making it work and I would like to have the hours back. I cleaned rust off everything. Especially the chute. That made little difference. Some not much still disappointing. I ended up doing my own Clarence's Impellor kit. I ended up putting pieces of sheet metal on the ends of the impellor blades. These were maybe .025" thick and maybe 2 inches long but as wide as the impellor blades. I quickly discovered that my impellor housing was NOT round but instead oblong! So in my particular case the bottom 90 degree area below the discharge chute itself is the widest point in the housing and it gets tight at the discharge. Now that being said, it was not tight anywhere before modification. It was more than 1/4" gap at the discharge and closer to 1/3" as I recall.
I set to doing the impellor kit which reduced the clearance at the bottom to maybe an 1/8th of an an inch and had my clearance at the discharge at like no clearance it was so close. LOL In fact, it was so close I had to cut the top of the housing because the area past the discharge actually had the tightest clearance of all. So much so my metal impellor extendors were hitting up there. So I made a front to back cut with the hand held grinder and then two cuts down the housing side towards the auger chain drive. Just enough to pry that area up out of the way of the impellor. I then stuck a piece of metal in there to hold the metal flap up. I used carriage bolts with the rounded tops on the impellor blade flat side to minimize drag there. fwiw
I also ended up striping the whole inner housing and impellor using an air driven wire wheel setup and painting the whole housing and impellor.
Results? Well, lets just say my throw distance went from about 13ft on the outside of the discharge stream with all the rust removed to about 17ft with everything painted to about 33ft at the very outside of the stream with the impellor kit. Unfortunately, in my particular situation this is shy of what I would like for throw distance as I'm situated in a nook with the outside from the house uphill into the woods and the house on the other side and its a big turn around area in there. So I have been doing a lot of thinking about designing an accelerator, chain driven jackshaft sort of affair, like someone else previously mentioned. But in truth, that is reasonably beyond my capabilities to do so. I seem limited by the 540rpm PTO speed and my tractor is not a dual speed PTO so this is a bit frustrating. I checked out formal PTO setups to speed up the output and $$$$ so that's a no go.
I ended up getting a 32" Ariens [ 1990's ST1032 ] walk behind snowblower, I'm in the process of doing an impellor kit on that, and putting on new belt and bearings. In the heavy lake effect snow event we had recently it saved my butt cause the garage collapsed on my snow removal equipment due to the depth and weight of snow we got overnight. [ uhgg ] So I ended up clearing everything we got which exceeded 8 ft in several days with the Ariens and I have to say the machine has impressed me. If you fill the snout with snow that 10hp Tecumseh throws it outta there and quite a distance too. For having about 1/4" clearance in the housing I was pretty happy with its performance. Can't wait to get the new bearing in her and see how she blows now. The housing is likewise wirewheel'd clean and painted with rustoleum rusty metal primer and rustoleum paint. It's now slick as slick with all the rust GONE. The housing clearance is as tight as I could get it. Which unfortunately, on that one is tighter at 180 degrees [ opposite ] the discharge chute. So once kitted, using thicker sheet metal this time bought from Tractor Supply. They sell it 3" wide by 32" long or so regular steel fwiw. I cut equal pieces, looked carefully where my holes needed to be on the impellor, cause there are supports underneath you don't want to compromise by drilling through, marked on piece of sheet metal bar stock, drilled small holes in it and then proceeded to use that as a jig to drill the others. The idea was to get them all identical so that if I ever have to replace I can use the same jig to make a replacement and the same mount holes. Anyways. Put them all in with phillips self tapping sheet metal screws into the impellor blades.
The Ariens was throwing snow I'd say a good 30ft without the impellor kit, with rust, and with worn out impellor bearing and auger bushings. fwiw. It's a gas engine and by nature of what it is, it spins faster than the 540 PTO and the impellor can be made to throw snow farther. That has been my experience with gas powered snowblowers. IMHO the 540PTO speed snowblowers are design limited in terms of throwing distance. Seems to me, the only way to make one throw further is to have a larger impellor to begin with which then would get the tip speed up.
It would be interesting to have a thread on which blowers are the best 540PTO speed blowers. Which is to say, which throw the furthest basically. I believe many today are made in montreal or quebec ca at RAD technologies. These seem to throw well but I'm not overly impressed with the weight of the units. fwiw
Sorry to run on here. I know there are some other guys out there suffering poor blow job performance. If only that could be fixed as easily!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL
) -- other than a slipping belt, of course. Mine got so bad it would only throw about 6 feet; finally replaced the impeller-- big difference! Rocks that I'd hit would bend over the blades enough to create a 3/8" to 5/8" gap. New impeller maxed at about 1/4".
