I have the world's wimpiest snowblower.
About a foot and a half of snow (or, for those living in coiuntries that use the metric system, about 50 cm) fell on Cyburbia Central yesterday. The Forester couldn't make nit out of the driveway, so breaking out the snowblower was a must.
My snowblower is small; not one of those monster 20 horsepower Buffalo specials that can heave even the wettest stuff clear over your house. It's a little two-stroke Toro, and it takes more coaxing to get started than it does to get me out of bed on a Saturday morning when there's no curling. The pull cord is useless, so I get an electrical cord, find the nearest outlet, and follow an arcane rutual to get the thing started.
1) Plug it in.
2) Turn the ignition switch to "on"
3) Turn the choke to "on"
4) Give the manual fuel pump button a few pushes.
5) Press start
After you hit start, the snowblower makes a
shrieking sound similar to the starter motor of a 1976 Plymouth Volare, wakes up with a rumble, and dies seconds later. Rise, lather, repeat, until it finally runs.
From there, theoretically you should move the choke to "off", and throw snow. Not with my Toro. The moment it so much as a single flake, it freaks out and stalls, as if it's saying "I'm a
sunblower, not a snowblower! I'm not sending these delicate crystals of H20 to a certain doom!"
Finally, after about seven restarts, each followed with an increasingly lengthier stream of profanities that would make even the most seasoned J.B. Hunt driver blush, the snowblower stays running. During then time I cleared my driveway, I only had to restart it five or six times, when it hit the dense mix the city plows pile up at the end of the driveway.
No, it's not an old snowblower; it's resisted work since the day I bought it. Right now, I'm waiting for my parents to make good on their threat to move into a condo, so I can travel up to Buffalo and liberate their monster snowblower; the one that can heave chunks of ice clear across the street at velocities approaching the speed of sound.
