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!

-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-

]

I used one of these once, albeit a little "steeper" in the bend:

It made shoveling almost a pleasure! :-)

Cheers! Rich

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

My old plastic pusher which was purchased new in 1971 finally got worn out. I got one of these

scrapers, they are used by farmers to clean out the barns. I'm really pleased and use it for snows up to an inch deep or so. We use a snowblower for deeper snows.

Right after I got the above, I heard about these scoop/pushers

haven't had the opportunity to see one of these in action but it appears to be very high quality.

Roger

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

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

Remove 333 from email address to reply.

This is my snow pusher;

bucket was welded with 312 stainless rod, IIRC.

Jim Wilkins Neat lumber saw you have there! Mike

LIAR! We all know that you glued catipilaars to your eyebrows. NO man grows green eyebrows that wiggle by themselves. ;-)

The young lady with the clippers gets quite upset when I won't let her do her thing on them three times per year. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Just because she wants to use a stump grinder...