FIFY Conrad.
Moving snow out of the way is one of life's most useless tasks IMO. By June, all of it is gone anyway and so the entire process is pointless. A nature- provided, make- work project.
I now have two snowblowers and am not done yet 'cause both of them are horrible to use. The first was a 29" Craftsman (made by AYP) and I 'stepped in it' pretty badly when I bought it because I did not realize it has a locked axle. So maneuvering the thing is a true horror show and exhausting. Then I bought a tracked Honda, going to the very epitome of snowblowers to ease that problem and that one is nearly as hard to maneuver but worse, very difficult to set up and use on a crushed stone driveway because the cutting edge, and auger depth is adjustable and can be set to be too high or too low.
So now I am eye-balling another, and hopefully final, solution. I am going to try a set of polymer shoes, much longer than the stock setup and hopefully that may allow the Honda to be set to dig in but prevent it from actually digging into the stone. Honda has corrected all of these errors and situations but a new blower is close to $3K. Ariens has some that also seem like they would work very well but frankly I am not confident that a middle- of- the- line model will be the solution and their top- of- the- line models are MORE than $3K. I would love to lease one for a season and 'test blow' (Easy Boys!) with it before actually buying one but that is not possible. And used Hondas are much less common than chicken's teeth, and the Ariens newer units are too new to be showing up used yet.
Brian
Shoveling snow is a good aerobic workout..... that is enjoyable to watch others perform from the comfort of one's living room, preferably with the wood stove loaded and humming along.