On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:29:56 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 08:36:52 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
. ..
On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 22:25:57 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:35:19 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 17:11:09 -0500, wrote:


I blew the belt on my 6HP YammerHammer blower, meaning I had to
push/pull the darn thing home into the garage.
It has (previously) eaten 2 goodsized chunks of newspaper/ads
burried
in the snow - but it wasn't the auger belt that let go - it was
the
drive belt to the Hydro unit. (But I will replace them both while
itr
is apart!!!)

Whuffo you do dat, clare? Ouch!
The paper thrower threw the paper either just before the snow fell,
or
in the middle of the dump. It was totally invisible and unexpected
in
both cases.

Wow, all that trouble from a single newspaper? I thought perhaps
you
had set out a stack for recycling and forgotten it.

They are small enough to pass through the auger and jam against the
impeller. Tree branches and chunks of frozen snowbank dislodged by the
plow can be as bad, and all are invisible in the jumble the plow
leaves, or if the wind levels the surface.

Bummer. I'm glad I have a total of 23 minutes of snow shoveling
experience. I think I remember 15 minutes of it somewhere a couple
dozen years ago, but the latest was a month or two ago when I got the
icy stuff off my driveway so I could bring in the mail. The trusty HF
grain shovel, bought for distributing bark dust and mulch, worked a
treat.
The second one jammed between the auger and the housing. It was a
bundleabout 5 inches in diameter in a plastic bag and it came apart
enough to get in like a wedge under the serrated impeller. I could not
bac it out or pry it out or cut it out so after tearing out as nuch as
possible I went at it with the propane torch.
Now, interestingly enough, even though the belt howled and smoked
before I got it shut off, the auger belt didn't fail. It hardly had a
mark on it. The belt from the engine to the hydrostatic transmission
basically "detonated" several weeks later, and not even when it was
being worked hard.