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

Yep - real easy to get the gearbox out but....the rest is a real nightmare.  I will NOT forget to grease the auger shafts this spring!

Love to watch those videos by Donnyboy on you tube. The guy is terrific!!!!! You would think for the amount of $ Honda charges for their machines they would put on a couple of zerk fittings. Marc

Wow, that was quite a process. I sure wouldn't want to be doing that very often. It was eye-opening to see how bound up it was, despite only having maybe 3-4" of gearbox shaft engaged with each auger.

That carbon arc torch was pretty awesome, too. I had never heard of those. After a bit of googling, it sounds like if you have a stick welder, you can make one of those fairly easily & inexpensively. I presume that a MIG welder could perhaps be coaxed into doing something similar, if you used some sort of carbon-tipped device screwed into the gun, rather than using the normal wire. The simple approach would be arcing to the piece of metal, rather than across to a second tip attached to the thing you're holding. As an example, I presume that removing the wire from the gun, and simply arcing from the copper contact tip, to the piece, would make the piece pretty toasty. The copper tip might melt, of course, you'd probably need something better able to deal with the heat. Or, more likely, I'm wildly off-base, and a stick welder with a dual-carbon-tipped contraption is the only way to do it.

Kudos to the author for making the video. I have to expect that took him a long time. There were a lot of different shots, so lots of setup and editing. He did a great job of walking you through the process. And, wow, if that doesn't motivate you to make sure your auger shafts stay greased and loose, I don't know what will. I wonder how tight the fit is between the shaft & augers when new. On my MTD, the augers have some angular slop, they can each rotate a bit forward/back on the shaft. Especially after some grinding I had to do around the shear pin holes to remove the bent pins, when I bought the machine. But I expect that the play has helped to keep them from rusting up. They can constantly move around a little, which can knock away any rust that's starting to form, before it has to chance to bind up in the gap. If they had a very close fit on the shaft diameter, and were pinned to the shaft tightly enough that they could not rotate at all forward/back, I'd expect that a small amount of rust developing could quickly bind them together very tightly.

RedOctobyr wrote:
I suppose the constant wiggling during use might have a salutory effect on keeping em loose (but not this winter, so far).  But I suspect they don't see much wiggling during the 8 months or so when the blower is just in storage.  I kinda remember that some study was done on car rusting and found that the vast majority of rust forms in warm months and this  makes sense to me since the humidity is higher then and also the temperatue and warm temperatures would speed up the chemical reaction by which rust forms.  Best time then to grease the auger shafts would be just before storage when winter is over.  Just sayin.

If the gear housing was cast iron,would it have not cracked??Good thing my machine has grease zerks.Some Honda owners think they are not necessary.

mikiewest wrote:
I would guess that a cast iron housing would not crack quite as easily as the aluminum kind, but it would not be impossible.  But whenever you are putting power into one end of the system and stop the other end cold, something has to give.  In that case it was the housing and the gear.  Could be that, with a housing that did not ceack, the expensive worm gear would have been done in too, so maybe it didnt make much difference to the overall repair cost.  Could even be that the housing cracked and saved some engine damage too, and that would have been an additional very expensive repair..

If you pull something bad into the blower.  And your augers are frozen on the shaft.  Something expensive is going to break. 

And it's gonna cost you lotsa money.

jrtrebor wrote:
That machine does look a bit worn and exposed to a lot of salt.  Anyways, that's is a good video to see what's involved in taking it apart.  Seems very straightforward to do.  It's not necessary to add grease zerks since only a small amount is needed at the union of the auger and the short shaft. 

I had my HS624WA for 10 years and never had any issues with the shafts getting frozen like is shown in that video. I  used to live at the bottom of a hill that got salted pretty good as it was just before an intersection. What I used to do to counter the effects of the heavily salted EOD was to do that area first. I would go straight to the EOD driveway area from the back of my property and go at it til it was done. I would then clear all the other areas of my property where it was all virgin snow free of any salt. This allowed the bucket area to be "flushed" clean of all that salt and prevent rust and corrosion from forming. I guess it worked because whenever I threw a shear pin (which was not too often), the augers would spin freely. That said, it is still a good idea to grease or oil that area every once in a while to minimize the chances of the two surfaces rusting together

I do the same as you FrankMA, start out with the EOD first and flush out the snowblower with clean snow afterwards.  It's good for the snowblower and plus you don't drag all that salty/sandy muck into the garage.  My HS1132 is going on 4 years now, I take out the shear bolts and spin the auger before storage and after coming out storage just to make sure it's spinning freely.  My machine is light residential use so that is sufficient to detect any problems.