I hate Murphy
- Thread starter Bill
- Start date
trampledbyturtles
5 year old buck +
Hey on the bright side, looks like a shooter is still around : )
John-W-WI
Administrator
I don't even leave the cover on my mower like that. Either I smoke the belt or it falls off!
Always good to have a spare. You can buy one from swisher for $30, or if you know the size you can get one at the auto parts store for $10. Hard to figure out the size after you break it
j-bird
Moderator
Best way to prevent a belt from breaking......have a replacement one on a nail in the shed....that damn thing with burn marks and chunks missing and frayed will last forever that way! Now that said - buy the spare in advance and then take a sharpie and write on it what it's for as well. And don;t forget to replace the spare once it's used!!
Changing that belt on the swisher rough cut for the first time sure sucks, but after you do it a couple times it goes better. They didn't leave a lot of room to work down there though. I buy the generic belts from Fleet Farm and they work great. Or at least they work great until I hit a stump and they get cut in half.
Bill
Administrator
I can't ever get the belt through the thing that keeps it on the from pulley with taking tha whole motor plate off and flipping it over.
j-bird
Moderator
I posted this in my property tour thread, but thought I would share here as well.
Saturday evening - I finished up spraying and I noticed my boom on my sprayer had rotated funny. I knew the tabs that held the boom where not the best design from FIMCO and I had bent them back many a time before. So I got off the tractor to hold the booms up to go home and went to "adjust" the boom/brackets and .....tink! They frick'n broke right off....both of them. I had my entire boom assembly in my hands. Only thing attaching it to the sprayer was the rubber hose! So these tabs had no structural support and over time the rust and mechanical fatigue was too much. Well at least I was done with that tank of chemical.....but I was still pissed! I still had more spraying to do.
So once I got home I devised a plan on how best to fix the issue. I thought about welding the tabs back on, but with no structural support I knew that wasn't the long term answer AND I'm not a welder. I needed something with some "backbone" and something I could do myself - I hate asking for help! I figured a piece of angle would be far better. Off to the local Rural King store the next morning to get me some angle and some hardware. I found a piece of aluminum angle that would be great. Easy to work with, plenty strong enough for what I will need it to do and I don't have to worry about it "rusting". I'm also not a machinist. So I cut the angle to length in my vise with my sawz-all and drilled my holes and tried to remove the sharp edges with my bench grinder. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. It's far more stout that even the original design and seems to be back in business.
Saturday evening - I finished up spraying and I noticed my boom on my sprayer had rotated funny. I knew the tabs that held the boom where not the best design from FIMCO and I had bent them back many a time before. So I got off the tractor to hold the booms up to go home and went to "adjust" the boom/brackets and .....tink! They frick'n broke right off....both of them. I had my entire boom assembly in my hands. Only thing attaching it to the sprayer was the rubber hose! So these tabs had no structural support and over time the rust and mechanical fatigue was too much. Well at least I was done with that tank of chemical.....but I was still pissed! I still had more spraying to do.
So once I got home I devised a plan on how best to fix the issue. I thought about welding the tabs back on, but with no structural support I knew that wasn't the long term answer AND I'm not a welder. I needed something with some "backbone" and something I could do myself - I hate asking for help! I figured a piece of angle would be far better. Off to the local Rural King store the next morning to get me some angle and some hardware. I found a piece of aluminum angle that would be great. Easy to work with, plenty strong enough for what I will need it to do and I don't have to worry about it "rusting". I'm also not a machinist. So I cut the angle to length in my vise with my sawz-all and drilled my holes and tried to remove the sharp edges with my bench grinder. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. It's far more stout that even the original design and seems to be back in business.
Bill
Administrator
Good non weld fix. That should hold forever..
j-bird
Moderator
That's the hope. I can weld, I'm just not good at it and I don't have the equipment to do it. The holes in the frame for the sprayer already existed so I just made them work for what I needed. I used it already and it seems to be doing just fine. One word.....FUNCTIONAL!
j-bird
Moderator
Murphy struck again today...... stopped my rotary mower......broken shear pin. Which it's a shear pin, so it did what it was designed to do, but still hate when stuff breaks.
HOWEVER.....I did something smart when I bought the replacement that failed today.....I bought TWO!!!!! I walked right in the house picked it up and had it fixed and back doing it's thing in a about 15 minutes.....took me longer to find the right tool.....thanks to my son!
HOWEVER.....I did something smart when I bought the replacement that failed today.....I bought TWO!!!!! I walked right in the house picked it up and had it fixed and back doing it's thing in a about 15 minutes.....took me longer to find the right tool.....thanks to my son!
Bill
Administrator
You did GOOD!
My day wasn't so good yesterday. My Dads old 51 Dodge has been sitting at my brothers for years. The brakes were shot. Wheel cylinders were rusted so bad they wouldnt move. It's been on Jack stands for weeks. I replaced everything, master cylinder, shoes, new brake lines and wheel cylinders. I cross threaded the last line I was hooking up. Spent a few hours in the back rooms of 4 auto parts stores looking for a replacement adaptor. No dice....
If I Can't find one Monday I'm going to drill and tap the cylinder to a size I can find.
I'm going to church this morning to apologize for the words that came out of my mouth yesterday........good thing my son is older now :) he heard it all......
j-bird
Moderator
Well.....I broke something else a few weeks ago! My lawn tractor/mower lost it's mind with a huge vibration. I took it into the local dealer/service center for that brand and they concluded I had bent the output shaft of the engine and thus the only way to fix it was to replace the entire engine.....to the tune of $1,200! I could replace the entire mower with a brand new one for roughly $1,700......so screw that idea. I wasn't entirely keen on their diagnosis anyway. Not sure how you would bend an output shaft where everything driven off that shaft is belt driven!!!!
So with that in mind I tore into it figuring I couldn't break it any worse! I pulled the pulley and PTO assembly off the shaft. Re-fired the engine and there was no noticeable vibration...... so the vibration had to be coming from something I had taken off.
I'm not an expert on these PTO assemblies......but I don't think they are to look like this!
This "ring" was inside the "housing" and appears to be fine re-melted portions of the core of the PTO...
You can see some of the "glazed" stuff on the "housing" here as well.
Here is the "core" of the PTO - I don't think I am supposed to be able to see those copper coils in there!!!!!
Anyways I think I can fix this with a few replacement parts for a whole lot less than the cost of replacing the entire engine! I won't be taking my mower back to that place again!!!! I figured you guys would like the carnage!
While I was working on this my son was working on a 2.3L 4 cylinder and pulled the pan and found metal pieces.....it was part of the piston skirt and a corner was broken off the crankshaft counter weight as well!!!! We thought he had blown the head gasket out of it over a year ago and it had sat. So it turns out he screwed it up much worse than we had thought!!!!
So with that in mind I tore into it figuring I couldn't break it any worse! I pulled the pulley and PTO assembly off the shaft. Re-fired the engine and there was no noticeable vibration...... so the vibration had to be coming from something I had taken off.
I'm not an expert on these PTO assemblies......but I don't think they are to look like this!
This "ring" was inside the "housing" and appears to be fine re-melted portions of the core of the PTO...
You can see some of the "glazed" stuff on the "housing" here as well.
Here is the "core" of the PTO - I don't think I am supposed to be able to see those copper coils in there!!!!!
Anyways I think I can fix this with a few replacement parts for a whole lot less than the cost of replacing the entire engine! I won't be taking my mower back to that place again!!!! I figured you guys would like the carnage!
While I was working on this my son was working on a 2.3L 4 cylinder and pulled the pan and found metal pieces.....it was part of the piston skirt and a corner was broken off the crankshaft counter weight as well!!!! We thought he had blown the head gasket out of it over a year ago and it had sat. So it turns out he screwed it up much worse than we had thought!!!!
Bill
Administrator
Naa, that should buff right out.
Gotta love the new sodium chloride they put on the roads in winter. It melts the snow but also eats metal or fuses it together. Who knows what it does to the environment.
