Dead, frozen, and covered in snow. I found the poor thing beside the garage. Forensics have identified the victim as a Craftsman…
I’m assuming the owner will be in a hurry to get her back.
Have you guys see the forecast for Thursday into Friday 6-8 inches where I am in the Cities …
Going to be some burned up belts with this heavy stuff.
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That’s a pretty new unit, will be curious to hear what the owner did to need your help so soon.
Ya. it just won’t stop. We probably got around another 5″ last night. I see their is snow in the forecast for Wed. – Sun. for this area. Its going to be a sloppy mess if all this snow melts quickly when it warms up. Hopefully it finds its way into the ground and the local lakes.
Maybe one positive with the early snow over is the frost line is shallow this year, or that’s what I hear anyway. Wife’s cousin had to do some digging in a field and frost line was only 4” deep. This was in sauk rapids area.
Yeah this winter has been relentless. I got another 6 inches, then looking at the end of the week another 8 to 12 predicted here. The funny thing is I saw a chart that said St Cloud current snow pack was 11 inches. BS! We have had 26 inches in just over a week at my house. 13″ in that bigger storm, 7 last week and now 6 this morning.
That’s a pretty new unit, will be curious to hear what the owner did to need your help so soon.
Okay, the owner has had his representative get in touch with my people. In other words, the owner’s wife got in touch with Mrs. Grouse via Facebook…
So at least I know who it belongs to and have a vague idea of maybe what’s wrong. Owner says it won’t blow snow but it runs fine. Some testing is going to be required, but I’d guess we’ve got a blown belt here maybe?
Belts and shear pins, boys and girls. If you’re got a single stage, you need only one belt. If you have a 2 stage, you need both a spare drive belt and a spare auger belt. The auger belt goes way more often but to be safe you need both on hand.
Shear pins. Cheap and easy to replace, but good luck finding any at a big box store now. Get them online in the fall so that you’ve got them.
Belt or shear pins would be the likely culprit for sure.
The auger belt goes way more often but to be safe you need both on hand.
Ooof, can’t remember the last time I changed belts, but I know for a fact that I don’t have any on hand! 
I don’t have lots of shear bolts handy, though.
Ooof, can’t remember the last time I changed belts, but I know for a fact that I don’t have any on hand!
I don’t have spare belts or Shear bolts on hand either. I should probably fix that. With the amount of snow I’ve blowed this year, its probably just a matter of time
I ordered something like a 12 pack of shear bolts off of amazon a couple years back. I go thru a couple every year. Always pays to have them on hand rather than trying to Macgyver something in a pinch. My experience is a shear bolt never breaks right when you are just about finished up with snow removal… it always breaks when you reeeally need to get the driveway cleared right after a dumping of snow.
How are so many people breaking shear pins? My snowblower has inhaled tarps, newspapers, enormous ice chunks, rocks almost every time I use it… never broke a shear pin. What’s the deal? Did the previous owner replace my shear pin with a regular bolt? I had better look…
My experience is a shear bolt never breaks right when you are just about finished up with snow removal… it always breaks when you reeeally need to get the driveway cleared right after a dumping of snow.
you got that right. stuff always breaks at the worst time
Always pays to have them on hand rather than trying to Macgyver something in a pinch.
When I get a snowblower that has a blown-out auger gearbox, almost always that machine has been the victim of a rigging job where the owner didn’t have or got sick of replacing shear bolts, so he put in good, hard Grade 8 bolts to “fix the problem once and for all”. Which fixed the gearbox once and for all.
If guys would just get a 10-pack of shear bolts and keep them on hand, they’d never be tempted to rig it with conventional bolts. Which of course they will always forget about and never come back and replace with proper shear pins….
You got that right. stuff always breaks at the worst time
Shockingly, I never get a busted snowblower brought in in the summer. Everybody’s looking for belts and shear pins during the same 4 months of the year basically.
How are so many people breaking shear pins? My snowblower has inhaled tarps, newspapers, enormous ice chunks, rocks almost every time I use it… never broke a shear pin. What’s the deal?
The deal might be that your auger is rust-welded solid to your auger shaft. I see this on older machines. You don’t break shear pins because the shear pins aren’t what’s holding your auger in place, but if you keep busting rocks it’s your auger gearbox that’s going to go to hell.
Remove all shear pins and see if you can spin the augers on the shaft.
If your machine has grease fittings on the auger shaft, grease them.
Also, are you the original owner of the machine? See the above comment about rigging job artists replacing shear pins with hardened bolts. Any chance somebody did this before you got the machine?
Auger gearboxes are very expensive. I did a Toro gearbox a few years ago and it was over $300 plus tax for the gearbox.
It just won’t go…
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How are so many people breaking shear pins? My snowblower has inhaled tarps, newspapers, enormous ice chunks, rocks almost every time I use it… never broke a shear pin. What’s the deal? Did the previous owner replace my shear pin with a regular bolt? I had better look…
Same here. Bought Troy Bilt brand new about 13 years ago.
Not one broken shear pin…
How are so many people breaking shear pins? My snowblower has inhaled tarps, newspapers, enormous ice chunks, rocks almost every time I use it… never broke a shear pin. What’s the deal? Did the previous owner replace my shear pin with a regular bolt? I had better look…
I’d double check you have the right shear bolt in there and someone didn’t replace it with a grade 8 bolt like grouse mentioned above. If thats the case, its only a matter of time before your gearbox turns into a pile of metal crumbs.
99% of the time, the culprit of my shear pins breaking is ice or hitting a snow bank that I compacted while plowing earlier in the winter and is now a block of ice.
How are so many people breaking shear pins?
It’s always rocks for me. They get wedged between the auger and auger housing and it shears the bolt like a hot knife through butter. At our old house, we had no rocks, and I never broke one. Now, I go through several per year.
For what it’s worth, mine sucked a newspaper right into the impeller a few weeks ago–didn’t break a shear bolt but sure stopped me in an instant. That was a major PITA to remove.
2nd owner of mine, first owner was brother in law and he hardly used it. I picked it up in Milwaukee and brought it back here to western WI, it’s been going strong for 6-7 years now without any issues. it helps it’s never seen a drop of ethanol gas and it starts on the 2nd pull every winter for first use. Gear oil looks good, I change it every other year. Engine oil gets changed annually along with the generator, mower, wheeler.
Tearing into it is sure to reveal a problem I don’t want to solve 
If it goes to hell during a snowstorm I’ll use the plow instead. Maybe I’ll bring it to STP and drop it on grouse’s front steps so he can laugh at me when I eat these words one day.
Ive never busted a shear pin either. I also dont encounter rocks or anything.
I have a Ariens 28 Deluxe. 5-6 yrs old and never a problem with shear pins,etc. But I take it easy on the tough stuff. If I have to go back and forth 4 more times on the driveway it beats having to fix it.
That’s a pretty new unit, will be curious to hear what the owner did to need your help so soon.
Update on the Craftsman. Not very exciting.
It turned out just like Ralph said above. A chunk of asphalt was wedged between the side of the auger housing and the auger. This machine has 4 shear pins, one on each auger section. All 4 were broken, so the asphalt chunk wasn’t the only thing that broke a pin. Some of the pins may have been broken for a while.
Luckily I had the right shear pins in the parts box so this machine is back home already. Ready to rock and roll on Thursday.
If concrete is wedged in you snowblower and all four shear pins are broken and you have no idea. You should probably only own a shovel. 
If concrete is wedged in you snowblower and all four shear pins are broken and you have no idea. You should probably only own a shovel.
And have your driveway replaced. 
DT
Luckily I had the right shear pins in the parts box so this machine is back home already. Ready to rock and roll on Thursday.
Sounds like the folks around you should keep your beer fridge stocked up well. 
If concrete is wedged in you snowblower and all four shear pins are broken and you have no idea. You should probably only own a shovel.
But then the rest of us would never get chances at barely used equipment sitting at the end of driveways. That is how I ended up with my current snowblower going on year 12 with it.
You guilted me into ordering belts for my machine. I also need to change the gearbox lube.
Have an 1990 something (94 maybe, was my dads so ive been running this thing since i was about 12) lawn tractor that has a mounted snowblower. After returning home from vacation week before last I was cleaning up the driveway from the last big dumping and threw the belt. Upon resetting it I found that the tensioning idler pulley was shot, a little surprising since I replaced it not that long ago. Broke it down and couldn’t find anything else wrong so got a new pulley and set it a little tighter in the tensioning window to see if that helps (guessing it slapping is aiding in wearing out the sidewalls). While I was at it I inspected the brake assembly since I knew the chains had caught it a time or two when they got loose. Yup, cracked the assembly housing, bent one of the bolts and was barely hanging on so today a new brake assembly is arriving. The joy of running 30 year old equipment, but beats the heck out of the price of a new equivalent machine.
If concrete is wedged in you snowblower and all four shear pins are broken and you have no idea. You should probably only own a shovel.
A lot of 2 stages will keep blowing snow okay with one side of the auger not working, so I suspect what happened here is at some point he broke the 2 pins on one side and just didn’t notice anything until he hit the asphalt chunk and took out the other 2 pins.
And if it were a law that you actually had to know what you were doing beyond how to pull a starter rope in order to own power equipment, well, they’d have to confiscate a LOT of power equipment. Let’s put it that way. I only work on stuff for friends, relatives, neighbors, etc but most of the problems I fix are pretty simple and yet are beyond the owner’s understanding. More than anything, it’s the lack of “summerizing” that gets people. If people could only learn how to shut off the fuel valve and run the engine until it quits, that would save about half of what I fix.
@thefamousgrouse
You guilted me into ordering belts for my machine. I also need to change the gearbox lube.
The belt is a “sooner or later” deal and they usually fail when they are really put under a high load and they start slipping and heating up. So, of course, that’d be about the 3rd trip down the driveway after a huge dump of wet heavy snow. Just when you don’t want the snowblower to break, basically.
I looked back in my log book that goes back to the 1990s and I’d say I averaged an auger belt every 5-6 years across several machines.
Currently, I have a Honda snowblower and the belt for that thing is a screwball metric size that you can’t substitute a generic for, so I learned the hard way on this machine, keep a spare. There are machines out there that use a standard belt size that is very easy to get so if that’s the case more power to you. Either way just having a spare turns most belt changes into about a 20 minute pit stop.
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