Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

Loss of drive soon after you start blowing can be caused by keeping the machine in a warm garage. When you start throwing snow there’s often a cloud of fine ice particles floating in the air and they will find there way into the drive housing where they come in contact with the drive disk and melt because the disk is warm. Water on the friction wheel / disk will reduce the torque to the wheels, but not to the point where you will notice unless you are pushing into a drift. However, depending on the outside air temperature, the friction disk cools off and the film of water turns to a film of ice with nearly zero friction and the drive stops working.

Assuming you have a warm garage, the solution is to put the machine outside for a while before you start throwing snow. If it’s really cold, maybe just ten minutes to cool the friction disk off so that snow hitting it won’t melt and then refreeze.

Even without a heated garage you can run into this phenomena if you use the thrower long enough and hard enough in conditions that allow the friction disk to warm up past freezing. As long as you keep going you only experience the reduced torque of water on the friction wheel / disk, but If you stop for a while, the water freezes and now you have no drive when you come back from your break, even if you left the engine running.

This phenomena depends on many factors including the kind of snow, air temperature, and how warm the machine was to start with. That’s why dealers can’t reproduce it and why many of their other customers with the same machine don’t report the problem.

If you don’t think that’s the problem take the belt housing cover off and look for holes or gaps in the plate that separates the belt housing from the impeller. The impeller shaft bearing is mounted to that plate by bolts and if one is missing or if there’s any gap in that plate snow may be blown into the belt and drive housing.

Spraying alcohol on the friction disk is problematic for several reasons. First, how do you do it without taking the bottom panel off? Second, alcohol is highly flammable and a mist of alcohol is explosive only needing an ignition source. Third, alcohol allows water to mix with oil, which is not something I would want on the internal workings of the drive system. Some sort of electric heat would be better, either intense light or heated air. Then again, the problem can usually be avoided by letting the machine cool off before starting to throw snow.  Honda avoids the problem altogether by using hydrostatic drive.