Not very often a simple invention comes along making you shake your head wondering how man can get to the moon before he invents a simple machine that improves his life immensely.
You’ve all heard about global warming. Well, unfortunately for the east coast of Vancouver Island that means winters are getting colder and snowfall once rare has now become expected.
Two weeks ago we had a dump and I was out shovelling my driveway. I’m now 56 and this job is now taking my breath away requiring frequent breaks. Then along comes my retired neighbour to help me. He’s already shovelled his driveway and having such a great time that he’s come over to help me. Fortunately he’s kicking my ass as he effortlessly removed about 5 tmes as much snow as me. I wanted to stop and let him finish, but I was afraid he’d move on.
So yesterday we just got another dump. I went to Rona and Zellers to find this shovel but they didn’t carry it. Finally I got one at Canadian Tire for $35.00 and cleared my driveway during the halftime of the Seattle/San Francisco NFL game.
No lifting, just slide scooping and sliding snow out of the way.
They may have changed the page ID numbers on you. The sleigh shovel is currently here.
And it looks like it’d give out after a season of scraping along the concrete… for $75, I can get the neighbor kid to shovel my walk for several years. Particularly if it never freaking snows, like this year…
No kidding. Round here, those are called “yooper scoopers” and are widely used by those who for whatever reason don’t have a snowblower. And they’re nothing new, I remember them being around when I was a kid.
I used them occasionally up north when I was a kid. They were okay for certain situations, but I found them mostly kinda useless, particularly when you had to deal with a lot of snow at once. In any case where I found them handy, a real snowblower was a lot handier.
That’d about right, but in fairness, folks who do not live where they get appreciable amounts of snow are not likely to have encountered them. I’ve been using them since 1984 or 1985.
I would disagree with slortar, a little bit. I find that they are very good for heavy snows. For very light snows, I have a really cheap plastic wide blade shovel that lets me clear the light powder off my 100’ drive in about ten minutes of a repetitive sweep action, down one side and up the other. For heavier snow, the ability to walk to the edge of the drive and simply tip up the handle without serious lifting is perfect. And for the really deep and heavy stuff, it works nice because I can use it like a front-end loader, scooping into the drift, backing up and pushing it to the side, pushing down the handle to get it to toboggan over the high snow at the edge of the drive, then lifting the handle to left it fall off. (Yeah, a snow thrower would be less work, but it takes gas (money), causes pollution, and does not provide aerobic workout.)
You know, I’ve thought about that before, Zebra. Wouldn’t it be possible to make some sort of contraption on wheels that’d almost immediately zap the snow and evaporate it? Of course, then you have that pesky problem of condensation and freezing into a sheet of ice on the sidewalk. We’d have to come up with a way to dispose of this water vapor.
What about better engineering? Can’t we get slightly curved sidewalks, a mini drainage ditch and a heating coil that’d bring the temperature above 33 degrees Fahrenheit? Would that be enough to stop this silliness know as “snow”?
Not sure how old it is, but we have an old wooden Snowscoop, still works great, that said, when we get snow, nothing works better than our old Kubota G-5200 HST diesel garden tractor with a simple single-stage front-mount snowblower
Single stage? Huh. I’ve got a truck with a blade on it and have thought about a blower for my old Alis Chalmers, tractor but that little old diesel tractor is a bitch in the winter. It doesn’t have a cab.
