Apparently, the answer is not very often. Which is probably why, when this guy came down our street to clear it up and make it a bit wider again, all three of my boys were glued to the window. It's essentially a giant snow blower, it sucked up the snow from the road and shot it across everyone's yards (this upset Josh a little since he had spent the night before shovelling out the front yard into a sort of fort formation, and this machine pretty much filled in all his hard work). I'm guessing that at some point in his travels on our street, things got too cold so he had to break out his blowtorch to heat up parts of the snow blower machine thing.
I think the fact that there was a blowtorch shooting flames into a machine for a solid ten minutes might have softened the blow of the snow fort for Josh. He certainly was the most amused of the three when it came to the fire. Zeke and Deacon were just thrilled this giant truck came down our street and stopped right in front of our house at lunch time so they could eat their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while they stood on the couch looking out the window.
Who knew Alaska could hold such excitement?
5 comments:
wow, AK takes snow clearing to a whole new level! Extreme in every way!
I wonder if that guy ever secretly toasts marshmallows on the blowtorch when no one's looking. I mean, that's got to be a job perk right?
that is much better than the snow clearing here in jersey haha ill take the AK snow removal any day if its always that cool.
Your assumption that things got a little too cold was correct. :) In the third picture, you will notice the black cylindrical object below the end of his torch. That's a hydralic motor which is linked to the snow discharge spout by roller chain. When blowing snow this way, it obviously gets broken up into small pieces and some of that very fine snow actually melts a bit. When it falls and collects on the hydralic motor and the roller chain, it begins to re-freeze, thus causing some ice build up, which in turn makes it so that the spout cannot be turned. At least that's what has happened to me in the past when operating a snow blower similar to this. The torch is the most effective way to melt that ice build-up quickly. I would say this fellow is trying to melt that ice so he can rotate the spout and blow the snow in a different direction. He realized his mistake(too late) when he saw Josh with his very sad face pressed against the window and vowed never to destroy another snow fort. :)
Was an interesting article, thank you..
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