Making a perfect snow pusher

What exactly is a "snow pusher"? Are you referring to a snow shovel, which has a flat blade and fairly high sides? A plow to go on a truck, ATV, lawn tractor? If you're talking about a manual shovel, you have to be careful of size and ergonomics or you could wreck your back if you try to shovel anything but light powdery snow.

With all your scrounging ability, I think you need to build yourself a snowblower of some sort. I imagine you could build a small single stage type from spare parts that would handle your driveway. It's paved and not that long, right?

I buy the 24" steel bladed heavy duty shovels, add a 1-1/2" x 1/8" wear strip with a couple rows of hard surfacing bead on, add a 6"x12" aluminum triangle to the top of the blade/handle to keep it from twisting sideways, and a custom cut piece of 1/8" steel welded into the bend area between the handle and the main part of the blade to keep the blade from folding under.

My drive way is 275 square yards, the turn around pad is 40'x31'. Driveway surface is sealcoated with crushed rock, about as abrasive as you can find. I can deal with a 1" nuisance snow in about 20 minutes.

2" doubles that, more than that and the 42" snowblower gets fired up.

I have a plastic pusher that works well for light snow up to

4-6", it's about 18" wide and snow will fall off either side no matter how wide you make it. I'd suggest working from the center out, working both ways. I have a decent size driveway and this is the method I use. No way I can go clear across in one pass.

Jon

I have a snowblower. It is a military snowblower on which I installed a HMSK-80 motor. It works well, but it is heavy and is a pain to maneuver. So when snow is light, I much prefer to push it away manually.

So I wanted to make a manual "snow pusher" that may be heavy. It would be used to push snow in front of me, and not to shovel it. So it could be a little heavy. It would be "high" and have sides as you mentioned.

i

The perfect snow pusher is bolted on the front of my neighbor's truck!

yes, believe me a snow pusher has been on my list of things to do for a few years now. been looking at them on-line to get an idea. i have a compact kubota tractor. i scrounged a ATV snow plow my brother was throwing away a that was given to him as a gift, i wanted to weld 1/4" plates to both sides but i think it's too small and i wanted to design something that would be quickly detachable. the quick detach design you see (kinda forks over a loader bucket) i don't like, it puts the pusher out WAY too far for my little tractor. puts too much side load on the mechanism. i want to be able to quickly remove the bucket and put the pusher on and take it off. oh, are you talking a manual pusher? sorry, didn't read your post all the way through. there's a new thing out with a big wheel, have you seen that? i don't know if they work well though.

i was thinking about building one of those using a old bicycle wheel.

This is my snow pusher;

bucket was welded with 312 stainless rod, IIRC.

Jim Wilkins

Those were common in the U.P. of Michigan in the 60's. Don't know if they still use 'em or if everyone's gone to snowblowers now.

-snip-

Here's some food for thought.

'd want to beef it up a bit but I like the basic design.

I'm with you-- there are times that the correctly applied human effort can be easier than messing with too-heavy machinery.

Jim [for a bunch of links and some thoughts about shoveling snow- this guy covers a lot of territory on one page-

]

A single stage snow blower would be more useful. Lite enough to do decks too.

Wes

I was looking at this one at my local mom&pop hardware & the owner said 'You can have it for $25 - call it an end of season special.' [It was marked $40]

$28 here- $90 marked down to $40 on amazon]

We got 1/4 of freezing rain last night- that got topped by 1" of snow by this morning. I managed to get some salt out about midnight so it was the perfect test for this beast. I'm a happy camper. It is heavy as hell, appears to be just as sturdy, and the curve on the blade is perfect for me.

If I was 10 years younger it would be perfect. I might make some training wheels for it.

Jim

Bingo! This site referred to the Yooper Scooper. I googled on that. Oooh, ya, dat's da one, eh!

I have a snow scoop like this but it is made of fiberglass and is my third choice for clearing snow behind our H Farmall and Arctic Cat four wheeler. It also works well for cleaning roof tops if need be. Steve

For light snow, I use a plastic blade snow shovel ~18" wide and push the snow in three, five foot stages across the 16' driveway, then fire up the blower and move the windrow over the hedge onto the boulevard of the side street (one of the benefits of a corner lot). Gerry :-)} London, Canada

No experience with this one, but it is just so different I thought I'd toss the idea in your head- 'The wovel' [wheel +shovel]

I hate knocking something I haven't tried- so I'd need to see one of these in action before I was a believer.

Jim

RCM only

On Thu, 7 Feb 2008 11:03:56 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, "Tom Gardner" quickly quoth:

There ya go.

Otherwise, tell Ig to go get one of these. They're a lot more fun.

's one of those rich Rusky fellers who made millions on eBay and the Internet, so it won't hurt him to buy propane.

-- Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do. -- Confucius

With age comes at least SOME wisdom...I think. My snow solution is good snow tires on my 1-ton van. It'll go through ANYTHING! I convinced my sister that a Honda Element was "cute", OK it didn't mater to her that it was all-wheel drive. We don't need to remove snow except for a bit on the back patio so the dogs have somewhere to go.

I'll get you the name of the one I use, best pusher I ever used. Snow does fall off the sides, BUT it does curl nicely over ontop of itself. It's an orange plastic job, used my first one untill I wore it down almost to the handle when it broke in two. I think I bought eight of them gave one to every menber of the family.

Plastic does wear off the bottom edge but you'll never get anything steel to slide as nice across a driveway. Snow does not stick to this thing at all.

The stickers fall off, but I know I wrote the name on the one at home.

I'll get a picture up at...

Thank You, Randy

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