# Reverse only goes forward on snowblower



## johnmarvin (3 mo ago)

On my Yamaha snowblower the reverse is not working when you put it in reverse it still goes forward so I know it’s an adjustment on the linkage, but not sure how to do that. Thanks very much.


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## English_Cat (Sep 1, 2020)

It's a bit of a pain to adjust, but you stand the snowblower vertically and take off the bottom plate.

If you follow the shifter down from the handles, you'll see that it activities a plunger mechanism, on the other side of that you'll see a 'moon' like piece with holes for the forward gears, and reverse gears.

It's really important to make sure that the gear is in 1st gear before you continue, otherwise you are making a sucky job 10x worse.

Now you need to disconnect the clutch rod, the longest one without the 'long nut' (turnbuckle).

Now you need to adjust the shift lever (the rod/handle you use to shift) so that it's in the centre of the 'groove' for 1st gear. You do this by turning the turnbuckle, turning in makes it go to the left, turning out to the right.

HOWEVER, this is only how to fine tune the gears, in reality your shifting mechanism is wayyy out of specification, and the manual doesn't describe how to fix this because it hadn't considered what decades of abuse and neglect would do...

To fix this you will need to straighten out the shift rod (with turnbuckle) the two ball joints on either end are probably worn out pretty well, and no longer facing the right direction. You need to make this rod absolutely straight with either ball joints in the exact correct position for this to work, and that's a lot trickier than said, I've seen this exact issue on every older yamaha snowblower I got, they are not maintained, and go wildly out of spec because they work anyway and nobody bothers to check it.

Then you need to reattach everything, and make sure that the gear is dropping into the correct hole, and the rubber wheel is is the correct positioning, further away being faster, closer to the centre of the disc, slower. These machines are usually so well used that all the parts are off spec, so you just have to do it by eye.

While you're in there, spray everything down and make it clean. Lubricate the rod that the rubber wheel slides along with grease, but make sure nothing falls onto the plate below it.

It'll be a lot of fiddling, but once you get it, it'll shift fantastic for many more years.


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## johnmarvin (3 mo ago)

English_Cat said:


> It's a bit of a pain to adjust, but you stand the snowblower vertically and take off the bottom plate.
> 
> If you follow the shifter down from the handles, you'll see that it activities a plunger mechanism, on the other side of that you'll see a 'moon' like piece with holes for the forward gears, and reverse gears.
> 
> ...


Thanks kindly


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## English_Cat (Sep 1, 2020)

I guess I should mention that you can 'cheat' the shifting by removing the moon piece, but that just means that you won't notice that 4th gear is actually putting out 3rd gear speeds because the system is still out of alignment, but no longer getting stuck in the holes that hold the gear speeds. It can be a quick fix, but I really wouldn't recommend it. I did it on one snowblower, and it always felt lackluster in speed afterwards.


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