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Giant Leaf Blower Cleans Yard Fast
Trevor Shute, Guelph, Ontario, used a 10-in. squirrel cage exhaust fan and a 4 hp Briggs & Stratton engine to build a trailer-mounted leaf blower that cleans leaves like nothing you've ever seen.
Shute pushes the unit ahead of his Massey Ferguson riding mower. "I use it to clean leaves off my 2-acre lawn each s
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Giant Leaf Blower Cleans Yard Fast FARM HOME Miscellaneous 29-1-10 Trevor Shute, Guelph, Ontario, used a 10-in. squirrel cage exhaust fan and a 4 hp Briggs & Stratton engine to build a trailer-mounted leaf blower that cleans leaves like nothing you've ever seen.
Shute pushes the unit ahead of his Massey Ferguson riding mower. "I use it to clean leaves off my 2-acre lawn each spring and fall," says Shute. "The blower runs at about 3,000 rpm's so it has a lot of force. It'll blow pine cones off the yard, and we also use it to clean sand and salt off our asphalt driveway."
He mounted the blower and engine on a frame that he made from 2-in. sq. tubing. It rides on three 10-in. pneumatic caster wheels.
The discarded exhaust fan came from a recently renovated cafeteria. The fan was originally operated by an electric motor that belt-drove the fan at 600 rpm's, which was too slow for use as a yard blower. So he removed the motor and replaced it with the Briggs & Stratton engine. The engine chain-drives the fan via sprockets and a double roller chain. He used small steel shims to get the engine to line up perfectly with the blower shaft and then bolted the two units together. He then made up a throttle cable that runs back to the tractor.
He used two pieces of 1-in. sq. tubing to build a hitch that connects the blower assembly to the tractor. The two pieces mount parallel to each other, with a bolt inserted through each piece and into brackets on front of the tractor. The two bolts serve as hinges and allow the blower to follow the contour of the ground.
The last step was to paint the entire assembly Massey Ferguson red.
"I start on one side of my lawn and just go back and forth," says Shute. "The leaves eventually end up in an adjacent field. The caster wheels make the unit easy to steer, and it turns quite short. I got the idea one fall as I was using an electric leaf blower to clean up leaves on our lawn. I got tired of raking and blowing and carting off the leaves and realized there had to be a better way."
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Trevor Shute, RR 6, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1H 6J3 (ph 519 822-6705).
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