A Bush Fix on Hoth
Build Series #11
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I live at the end of a very long dirt road on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
It snows here.
A lot.
This winter, we’ve gotten several feet of the stuff already, and the current standing snow load (i.e. that which hasn’t melted off in the sun yet) is about two-and-a-half feet deep. Some years, it can get up to five feet deep…or more.
Nobody else lives out here.
If I want to be able to drive out to get things like groceries and mail, I have only two choices:
I can park a vehicle up on main road that someone else already keeps clear for their own reasons, or
I can keep the snow on my spur road clear all on my ownsome.
Snow Clearing in the Wilderness
Last year I published The Parable of the Shuffle Plow, in which I described my unconventional approach to snow clearing and the logistical considerations behind it. If you don’t want to go read that essay (though you should—it’s invariably popular with readers), here’s the TL;DR:
A little scoop plow shaped like a tractor bucket, powered entirely by a walking human, is the most robust-to-disruption snow clearing solution I’ve been able to find.
Using this little gadget, I’ve kept a mile of mountain road—which is literally uphill both ways—plowed and passable for two-and-a-half winters, now.
But it is a lot of work. Now that I’ve proved the concept, I want options.
So, for this year, I got my little 26” snowblower working. Yeah, it’s not exactly ideal for a one-mile driveway, but I’m on a very tight budget, so I’ve got to build out slowly. I’d been planning to wait another couple years and get a 50” snowblower, but this one popped up on the local used market last year for a price I couldn’t refuse…because it needed some work.
Tuning up small engines is a skill that I’ve got in my back pocket, so I snapped it up for a criminally low price and got to fixing it. After being delayed a season by an unfortunate encounter with a mad surgical team, I got around to rebuilding the carburetor and fixing up the wiring on the thing, and the little bastard was good to go.1 This happy little snowblower was ready to take me places (like, for example, the glorious plowed road at the top of the next hill over).
And then the weather didn’t cooperate.
Snowblowers, as you might have deduced from the name, take snow on the ground and blow it way up in the air in the direction of your choosing.
They’ll also pick up and blow anything else in their way, like, for example, rocks and sticks. Put enough rocks and sticks through a snowblower and you won’t have a snowblower anymore.
I live on a dirt road in a forest. Rocks and sticks are basically my version of “pavement.” This presents a fairly obvious problem.
Fortunately, the same forces that covered Greenland and Antarctica in ice can work to my advantage in this situation.
How To Make A Glacier
That is a glacier. It’s an ice sheet dozens-to-hundreds of meters thick. Glaciers live in places where the weather rarely rises above freezing, so any snow that falls pretty much sticks around forever.
Ice, however, doesn’t fall in sheets. How the hell, then, do snowflakes turn into glaciers?
Snow falls, and sun shines. Even though snow appears white (meaning, it reflects the full spectrum of light), it’s actually clear, and it functions like a greenhouse. Sunlight penetrates the ice crystals and get bounced around. Visible light emerges again, but infrared light (i.e. heat) gets trapped inside.2
Every day that the sun shines, no matter how cold the air is, some of the snow melts, flows down towards the ground, and re-freezes.3 Over time, snow turns to ice—you can actually watch it happen, because the texture of the top-level snow changes as its water content falls. Cornflakes seem to grow atop it, and a styrofoam-like layer of stiff, powdery ice forms a crust atop the snow drift (rather like the crust on a crème brûlée).
Meanwhile, more snow falls on top of the old snow, and the weight compacts the lower layers, squeezing the snow into the melt-and-freeze ice until there’s a good solid layer of ice down there.
So, to use the snowblower, I had to wait until we had a good ice layer on the ground. Once that was down there, I could run my snowblower to my heart’s content without ever having to worry about sticks and stones breaking my snowblower’s bones. Two weeks or so after the first snow, and everything would be Jake.
Some Winters are Dumber than Others
That strategy works really well when temperatures drop well below freezing in advance of the first snow that sticks. For those of you south of the 41st parallel, this is known as a “hard freeze” because all the moisture in the ground freezes solid, turning the soft soil beneath your feet into something as hard as concrete.
When it happens the other way around, you’ve got trouble.
Snow is an insulator. If you get snow sticking to warm soil (warm=above about 29 degrees Fahrenheit), that soil is going to stay grainy and dirt-like throughout the winter. Oh, sure, the water in the earth will still freeze, but it won’t freeze solid.
And you won’t ever get a nice solid sheet of ice on the ground, because the ground is too warm to support it.
And that’s the kind of winter I’ve been having.
The snow came, and I wanted to use my snowblower.
So I waited.
I checked the ground—still unfrozen.
So I waited some more.
And waited even longer.
I waited until the goddamn snow was piled so high that I had to shuffle-plow the whole stinking road.
And then, a miracle! We got cold temperatures, followed by snow. I got my ice layer.
The snowblower came out!
Snap Boom Bang
Mowing the snow is kind of like mowing the lawn (if the lawn was a couple feet deep and made of cold wet talcum powder). Or, in my case, mowing the road. I have a pretty stupidly extensive driveway situation, but I figured I should leave that for last. Keeping the road clear is more important than having a variety of options where parking is concerned.
I started on a bit of road I’d neglected with the shuffle plow. The deep snow would give me an idea of what I could expect from my little motorized snow-mulching machine. It plowed through like a champ.
My snowblower and I, we were best friends. It took me through ditch and over dale, shaving down the road to that beautiful ice layer, until…
…I stopped for lunch.
As has happened so many times in history, lunch was the ruin of a grand partnership.
The snowblower, as I might have mentioned, is used.
Very used.
40-year-plow-horse-level used.
When you get going with it, you’ve got two controls. One makes the wheels spin so you can go somewhere, the other makes the auger (the snow-mulching-and-throwing gizmo at the business end) spin so that you can actually get there.
Both are controlled by cables hooked to levers on the handles of the snowblower.
And when I got that lovely little workhorse going again, the auger cable said “I’ve had enough of this being pulled-tight shit” and snapped.
I fished all the parts of the shattered cable assembly out of the snow and hiked the weary quarter-mile back to my forge building to see if I couldn’t find a way to fix it.
What I discovered sent chills down my already-snow-soaked spine.
What you see there is the end that goes to the lever (the rod with the crooked finger at the end) and the end that goes to the auger (the hoop end). What you don’t see is a connection between them…because that connection is where it broke. There used to be a lead fishing weight on the end of the cable that nestled inside the barrel of that long adjusting nut. The barrel of the nut split open and sent the end of that cable flying.
The proper way to deal with this kind of problem is to order a fresh part. I tried that. But this old girl is made out of parts that the manufacturer doesn’t make anymore—this particular cable assembly is simply not available anywhere in the world. If I ever wanted my snowblower to run again, I was going to have to construct a new end for that cable.
In the mechanic world, this is called a “bush fix.” If you’re off in the bush, you make-do with whatever you can lay your hands on. This is how most equipment in the wildernessy world—from most of Africa to the outback of Australia to the gold mines of Canada to the ranches of the lower 48—are repaired when emergencies rear their ugly head.
The Build
Looking at the way the old cable-end was made, it’s pretty clear that the thing is designed to be put in place and then tightened down (the threaded rod on the long barrel nut is the giveaway). My equipment failure was was, in fact, as a result of slightly over-tightening the cable after it had worked itself loose during my first snowblowing session.
Unfortunately, the barrel nut was exactly the piece that had failed, and I didn’t know the terminology to order one. I was going to have to figure out something that would do the same job that I either had on hand or could get at the local hardware store.
Over a cup of coffee, I realized that the Rocky films held my answer.
If you’ve ever watched a wrestling match or a boxing match, you’ve seen an arena bordered by cables. The cables are tensioned and held in place by a fastener which is concealed beneath padding—that fastener is a fun little gadget called a turnbuckle.
Turnbuckles are long barrel nuts with threads at both ends—one side is a regular right-hand thread, the other is reverse-threaded. The result is that, when you stick appropriately-threaded rods in both ends and turn the body of the barrel nut, the whole assembly grows or shrinks in length. You can pull two ends of a cable together without making the cables themselves twisty.
“If I can get a turnbuckle small enough with a hook on one side and an eye on the other,” I thought, “and something to crimp the old cable onto the eye end, I could just hook the turnbuckle into the lever and be off to the races!”
I girded up my loins and put on a shirt that wasn’t covered in grease and sallied forth in search of civilization.
The hardware store did not disappoint.
Behold! The turnbuckle, all connected up to the old cable. I was home free!
After taking the above picture I went out to the snowblower…
…only to find that the cable-shortening I’d had to do meant that, even with the turnbuckle at maximum extension, the new cable assembly couldn’t quite reach the auger lever.
I returned to the shop to contemplate the fundamental unfairness of the universe.
As I trudged, I found myself thinking this way:
“The rod from the old cable assembly might work…if it’s long enough.”
The universe, however, conspired against me. The old rod was the wrong size.
So then I thought:
“Well, what if I just make a new hook with a longer shank?”
I had a root round through all my sundry hardware and salvage metal, and came up with an old tent stake that looked like it was just about the right size.
All I had to do was make that smooth shank fit my turnbuckle.
How, you ask?
The solution lay in a gray box atop the spray paint cabinet.
Inside that box is a magic kit that every maker (and DIY mechanic) should own: a tap-and-die set.
The long things are “taps,” and they’re used for cutting female threads (like you find on the inside of a nut). The round things are “dies,” and they’re used for threading rods to make bolts. If you’re ever working on a car and cross-thread a bolt, you’re likely to screw up the threads either on the bolt or in the bolt-hole. If you’ve got these, you can avoid a trip to the auto parts store (for a new specialized bolt) or the car dealership (if you screwed up the hoe in your engine block). Run the bolt through a die of the correct size, and a tap through the bolt hole, and the bent threads will be magically straightened.
Or, if you’re making something from scratch, you can turn a tent stake into a new threaded bolt for your turnbuckle.
I selected the correct sized die, loaded it into the die wrench, and cut myself some threads.
I took my newly triumphant turnbuckle and mated it up to my new ultra-long hook…
And it didn’t fit.
A check with the calipers confirmed it: the tent stake was metric, while the turnbuckle bolt was SAE (i.e. Imperial), and the metric diameter was a few thousandths of an inch thicker than what I needed.
If I had a metal lathe, I could just turn it down. I don’t have one, but I do have a drill press that I could use for that purpose, like I did in this build:
But the daylight was fading, and I wanted to get back to clearing my road. So, in desperation, I grabbed the rod from the old assembly and bent an eye into the back end of it:
Kludgy as all hell, but it just might work.
The Field Test
The sun was setting over the western mountains as I returned to my snowblower. I had my headlamp with me to let me work after it disappeared entirely.
I reached the little red menace and put my bush fix to the test.
Would the new cable assembly reach?
It would indeed!
And thus was the snow removal process saved from slipping a rung or two down the technological ladder…at least for this season.
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By the way, if you own a lawnmower, a chainsaw, or another such small-engine-driven appliance, take a week and learn how to work on it. A good small engine mechanic will cost you $70/hr, but literally everything you can do to a small engine can be done with about $400 in tools and a week of training. Over the long term, your wallet will thank you.
Polar bear fur works the same way.
Some of it also sublimates, but that’s a whole other story that’s not relevant to this one.