After the second use of my snowblower, the blades of the auger pulled the bottom wire of the Guard wires inside. Luckily, the pins broke, and besides that, the guard is ruined, and I had to replace the pins; everything works after I removed the protection and placed new pins. But how can this have happened? My driveway is flat and no rocks or any other obstacles.
The side of the Auger is a little damaged since the screws were pulled in.
See the images. I have submitted a ticket and will see the reply.
No it absolutely shouldn’t have happened. Candidly, my first thought would be that Yarbo bumped into something and that ‘something’ bent the guard inward which caused it to catch on the auger.
I agree. But there is nothing on my driveway besides a big pile of snow to bump into:). Even if it bumped into something, it should not be so hard to bend that wire.
Luckily, everything works, and I will not put on the guard anymore but even if it had hit a rock or so, the auger should have stopped.
Snow had been known to bend those guards. The best advice I’ve seen by a fellow PPP is if you want them, flip them upside down so it lets more snow in unobstructed. Removing a few of the bottom bars helps too. However, it’s just better all around to remove them.
Yes, it did. I wasn’t home, so I did not know that this happened. I did send Yarbo out, and it ran, but just pushed snow. I saw on my cameras that no snow was blown out, so I sent it home. Once home, I saw what had happened.
You’ve come up with a pretty interesting mystery. Do you happen to have cameras so you can see what happened?
If I was you, I’d still be trying hard to figure it out because whatever Yarbo bumped into is still an obstacle that it might bump into again. And this time you won’t have the guard to protect the auger.
Maybe you have your perimeter too close to a wall or decorative stones or something??
While possible it’s something else, with the weight of snow, it will bend those bars in just enough sometimes and the auger will snag them and pull it in more. It happened a few times last year to some users. Saw it once this year at least. Now twice.
Thanks @rgloverii, but I checked, no walls or stones near the perimeter of the snowblower. I have some stones in the middle, but that is a no-go zone, and Yarbo definitely did not go in there (no snow tracks). So it has to be heavy snow as @bryan.wheeler is suggesting.
I’d ask for a new snowblower if its got auger damage - this is brand new. Its a guard on a snowblower that snow will push into. Seems like it should at least not bend from the very thing it is intended to be used for. Silly you for thinking otherwise. It still amazes me, before you even get one you know you have to start modifying it…take the guard off, remove this part from this module, oh, the documentation does not match the hardware we sent you…don’t worry that part isn’t needed anymore…
Welcome to Yarbo Ownership - hopefully this will be your last reason to call them!
I put the guard on mine last week, to stop it from breaking shear pins when it rams the concrete steps in front of my house. The first thing is did was ram the steps and do the same thing to my guard as yours did. So I have a broken guard and a few broken shear pins. Lucky I was watching it and was able to stop it on my phone.
Yeah by me shoveling it myself, lol, but no really that is what I have been doing.
I am guessing object avoidance on the snowblower must not work yet. Ugly as it will be the only thing I can do to prevent it is to add pieces of steel angle iron to the corner of my steps so that Yarbo can hit that with the bumper and hopefully stop it from breaking shear pins, I am down to just a few spares and yarbo shipment of 24 more is on a slow boat from China, I ordered it December 13th, and it is scheduled delivery on January 5th. The have to figure out how to speed this up! This day and age it should only take a few days to get parts, not weeks.
No, don’t trust the obstacle avoidance at the moment. It’s still somewhat aspirational.
So going back to your driveway. Why are steps inside the snowblowing zone? Can you shed some light on that.
Basically, the goal should be to map out only where you want Yarbo to snowblow. Any areas you do not want Yarbo to snowblow should either not be mapped, or you exclude them by putting a no go zone around the item that needs to be excluded.
Can you put a screenshot of your map here? Cause I think we might be able to help you out.
The steps are just outside of the sidewalk that is mapped. If you walk up to my house up the sidewalk, you then step to the right on the front step. So Yarbo is going past the steps, he is not suppose to run into it at all. One time he turned off the sidewalk and turned a 90 degree turn before the steps.
What makes people mad is that basic features do not work on this thing at all or poorly at best, yet you see all the promo stuff saying everything is perfect, just sit in the house and Yarbo does all the work, I call bull shit a hundred times over.
But it bothers me that my auger is a little damaged now. If I had known, I would have removed them from the beginning.