Give that man a cheroot!
I finally found it, or at least the biggest problem by far. The whole bucket is just a little bit 'not square' to the tracks and that was causing the right edge to dig in 'cause it was lower than the rest of the scraper bar. I had set it to the highest position but the bucket bottom lip ended up being just a tad below the blade but only if you looked at it from straight ahead, which of course I did not (almost had to turn the machine on its back to see the problem). So the bucket lip ended up actually bending back and making a really big, dull cutting edge, more on the right side but all across the scraper bar. So I cut the scraper bar back at a slight angle, which makes it straight when mounted (easy boys!) on the bucket, then straightened out and trimmed the actual bucket itself back.
While I was there, I went nuts and adjusted the throttle so it opens all the way, adjusted the choke so it is all the way 'off' when set to off, and found the mystical, secret way to increase the machine's speed by about 40% that Honda secretly built in there.... the clever little fellows :-) Now it will go both ways (easy boys!) faster than I want it to; it used to crawl back at an annoyingly slow pace. Then I went nuts and picked up a mechanical tach. and actually set the engine to the right speed (what a cool tach. too- all mechanical and it works on physics). And finally I put a set of impeller spacers on it so it throws better and cleans the inside of the impeller housing.
Now the machine runs perfectly.... like a Honda. It runs faster and smoother without the earlier surge (from the choke). It will now throw snow over the roof of my house all the way toward the neighbor's driveway. But the best part is that it now tracks like a tank, does not pull in either direction and will dig into whatever is in front of it including the 7 or 8" of hard, frozen snow in my backyard that I cannot put a shovel into. Yippee. Color me happy.
If you guize think the C-14 manual is off, you should read Honda's instructions on how to set up one of their snowblowers. The translation is fine but the instructions are wrong and a bit worse than useless :-(
And the best part of all is what we gots somewhere upwards of a foot of snow that I will get to put in the neighbor's driveway!
Brian
When the bucket rides up, I back up and hit it again. Although my thrower has tracks and will gladly climb up and over most snowplow berms.
Check the blade at the back bottom edge of the bucket. It may be worn and not doing its job of cutting into the snow.
We got 2 feet up here, and another 4 inches today. Today's was just barely enough to fire up the snowblower for, since I also have a gravel driveway. (My Subaru Outback (of course) and Daughter #2's Subaru Forester would have been fine, but Daughter #1's Corolla wasn't going to get in the driveway.)
