Can A Belt Driven Snow Thrower Be Used With A Shaft Drive Garden Tractor

I've recently upgraded my "little" home tractor from a Craftsman garden tractor to a Ford 1210 4wd with 540 pto. Plenty of power, weight & traction for snow. I've got a 180' long (5300-sf) driveway out in the country. Tractor also has a loader, but the loader doesn't "throw" the snow like the blower does.

Still have the Craftsman 46" 2-stage snowblower. It ran off the mower deck PTO with an intermediate pulley train that gears-down the mower's 3600rpm, then the blower belt goes out, up at a 90 around the blower drive pulley, and back down. So the blower drive pulley is vertical. If you were to stick a pto shaft stub on it, it'd point right at the tractor.

Wondering if it would be possible to adapt a PTO shaft onto the blower's drive pulley, add the cat1 pins and top link bracket, and run it with the little 1210's 540 pto? probably add some wings to gobble up a large swipe. It's a 13.5hp PTO

Fabrication isn't an issue. I can weld, have cad & cnc plasma, etc.

Just wondering if it's been visited? Show-stoppers? Etc?

Rotational direction might be it, but I have to double-check. It's August and all the snow-crap is put away.

Thanks,

Dan

Last edited: Aug 1, 2017

It's rather narrow at 46", so your tires are gonna be compacting some of that snow, for sure. Perhaps you can put little wings on it to direct in the snow. Your main issue is likely to be speeds; you can measure the pulleys and get an idea of what the rotor and the blower need to see. It seems that the blower will need to be driven, and if the original power input to blower ratio is around six or seven to one, you're in good shape. Of course, it won't be, so you'll be adding some "gearing".

Does the rotation of the blower input (clockwise or counter-clockwise) match your tractor's PTO rotation?

You have moved to a Japanese 4 WD 1500# tractor. You will be spending all day patching up the garden tractor blower after the 4WD pushes it deep into a pile of frozen muck at the end of your driveway.

Sell the Craftsman blower and start looking for an old 2 stage blower.
With your equipment and skills you can fix most anything but starting with a blower which is too light weight is a bad idea.

In the end you will have a far better product. Fixing things in the middle of a snow storm is not fun.

Something like this McKee sold by Kubota and others will not be expensive although rough looking.

Dave M7040

Does the rotation of the blower input (clockwise or counter-clockwise) match your tractor's PTO rotation?

BINGO! The rotational direction is backwards.

Looking at the mouth-side of the direct-PTO 3pt mounted snowthrower, the chute is on the left because the thrower is spinning CW. On my little craftsman thrower, the chute is on the right because the thrower is spinning CCW.

So on top of the reduction to get the RPM right, I'd also have to use a geartrain to reverse the direction, or else hack the blower up to flip everything around. Sounds complicated. Maybe can find a set of 6-spline quick-change gears that are like 3:1 and cut the 540 down to 180 (or lower) and make a little reduction/directional box that will take 15hp. The beauty of the former belt drive is that it's got built in "give", whereas gears...they don't give. Would need a pto shaft with a clutch. Getting expensive.

But I'd still rather try it for $300 rather than spend $1500 on a 3pt thrower.

Not worried about the width of the 46" thrower. The new wings will add 8-10" and snow here in NW Ohio is never more than 8-10" aside from some drifting. Even with the 15+ yr old 18hp Craftsman lawn tractor powering it, the thrower would kick some butt.

Last edited: Aug 18, 2017