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

Hello all!

I've been reading this forum for a while now since I purchased my first ever snowblower this fall and got really excited about owning this gorgeous piece of machinery.  I think Murphy's Law is in effect, because we have had hardly any snow here in Cleveland and I've only been able to use this beast one time.  With all my spare time, I've been thinking about ways to make this thing better than it is. (I'm a tinkerer at heart!)

Here's the lowdown:
I wanted the best bang for my buck.  When I started researching, a lot of the sites I read told me that the more power I could get, the better.  (In hindsight, maybe I would have have gone for smaller but better quality, but I digress.)  I have an acquaintance that works at Sears and was able to get the Craftsman model 88690 for $610 after tax.  I chose this one because it has the B&S engine as opposed to the Tecumseh and it has none of the complicated and easy to break controls, like a joystick or hand warmers.  I went with it because for the price I really thought it couldn't be a bad deal.

The thing looks great in the garage, the neighbors are envious and the one time I used it, it performed flawlessly.  But I can't leave well enough alone.  I have a problem.    ;-)

I learned about and immediately installed Clarence's Impeller Kit.  (Warranty be damned; from what I read on these sites Sears wouldn't help if I had a problem, and I am not afraid to tear this thing apart if need be.)

Now I'm looking at that plastic chute.  I'd love to replace that thing with a nice, tall metal chute.  And this thing needs a remote deflector cable too.  (See how my sickness takes over?)  My question is, I know MTD makes the Craftsman, and now what I'd like to do is find a similar MTD machine but with a metal chute and install it.  I've searched through the Troy-Bilt, Yard-Man, White Outdoor, etc... sites and am not having any luck finding this elusive part. 

Can anyone point this mad scientist in the direction of good metal chute that might fit my MTD machine? 
Thanks!

- Jay

Why don't you go to a few snow thrower repair shops to look for an old machine with serviceable chute.  You can bet that there are a lot of old machines kicking around that might have salvageable part you'd be interested in.  If you get a steel chute, put a plastic liner in it. 

   I think your Craftsman 88690 is a Husqvarna and not an MTD.

   I though the Husqvarna machines I saw had composit materials for the chutes.  ??  If so you'll need an older Husqvarna and have to match up the chute diameter and worm type with the teeth on the chute base rim.   The dealer up the street has few dead Husqvarna's tipped up on their buckets in his junk pile. 

   It's interesting about what a modified chute might do.  I would think that ti's all part of system that is designed to function together.  For example I don't think you can just take a 3 vane 13 inch impeller and modify it with 4 and expect an improvement.  It would probably be worse.  The three vane was designed with a vane shape for a certain speed and amount of snow inbetween blades  If you modified the number of vanes I think you would have to modify the vane shape.  The same if you modified the speed.  

   So with the chute.  The chute is just section of the design and I think you would have to change other things like the opening shape, height of opening to get positive results.  Part of the reason for this is I don't see lots of difference in output between design results for 3 and 4 blade impellers given similar speed and power available.  Both designs are optomized.  The only very general thing I've found in output is the very big machines usually have 4 vanes but certainly not all.   Four vane machines are used on 4 and 5hp 20 inch intake machines.   Overall there's no relationship between 3-4 vanes and any single thing. 

   For a while I thought a thinner taller chute would line up the snow and help keep the snow together and because of that go through the resistance of the air better - longer - further.  I'm not so positive now.  I read your post just after writing to a friend who put a tall chute on an older Ariens machine.  He had the base cutoff and had base of the original chute welded on.  I'll get an answer in day or two.  It will be interesting and I would have tried it already if I thought it had a good chancess of success but I think it would take more than a stretched chute to get geater distance. 

    The older Ariens short chute machines seem to me to all splatter.  By that I mean they seem to throw the bulk of the snow in the high arc of the output but lots of snow falls short in inverse proportion to the distance away from the original arc.   Most snow goes far, a fair amournt has less of an arc and falls short of the high flown snow and a little splatters 7-10 feet away - unlike the taller chutes which get most of the snow close to what ever the furthest landing point was.  The splatter I think has more to do with the vanes and opening than the chute shape or length.  

   If you do modify something I'd like to hear about the results and see a picture.

david

 

trouts2 wrote:
I think this is true with respect to recent Ariens (the pro's, anyway).  Compared to my 10 year old pro
my new one throws a much more focused stream.  It's hard to tell what kind of difference there might
be tonnage-wise.  As you say my older machine will throw pretty far but also everywhere in between
and in a pretty thick stream whereas the new one sends most of the snow to the same small spot
even if the spot is thirty feet away.   This is useful when you want to throw over something.  The other
day using my new machine I threw some snow over my car which I would never do with my old machine.

Paul

    The older 924xxx Ariens series had an impeller speed of 1080 on 7 through 11 horsepower machines.   The distance spec was 3-30 feet.  On the newer 924's at least from 2002 have an impeller speed of 1310 and a taller chute and a distance spec of 40 feet.  Many might say that the better distance of the newer machines was due to the taller chute but its more is involved.  

 

The taller chute new chutes have a slow curve probably to optimize things but what are they optimizing, distance, throughput, or both?   I’m beginning to wonder about the tradeoffs.   At times it seems that they are designing for fresh snow 6-12 inches and the attack on the piles suffering with the newer machines.