Well Koga,how about an update on the lawn tractor.
The lawn tractor deal:
Well, last Sunday was mechanic's day for me, so I tore into 4 different pieces of equipment. My garage was starting to look like a repair shop instead of the place to park cars.
1. Pressure washer - see thread above
2. Co-worker's beat string trimmer - could not get it running in the 1 hour I was willing to invest in it, gave it back to him Monday and told him to get out the credit card. I could not convince him to get a baby Stihl FS45 or even an Echo, so I guess he'll get a Lowe's Depot or K-Wal unit again.
3. The Snapper rear-engine rider - tore the old Briggs motor apart and it had about 2 feet of side play in the valve guide (OK, 2 feet is a slight exaggeration). One of the shops in town here said he could get the old Briggs replacement guides and put them in for me, but he also had a new-in-the-crate 8 hp vertical shaft Briggs motor on the shelf that would bolt right up and I could have it for $275 with a 1 year shop warranty. You can guess which deal I took.
4.
And now the lawn tractor deal: the "big" Snapper got its rear axle jacked up off the ground to diagnose exactly where the whole drive system is not engaging. If you're not familiar with Snapper's older "D" type tractors, what they have is a horizontal shaft engine with a drive shaft that runs under the console and ends in a big honkin' flywheel style disk under the seat. It faces toward the back. Then a rubber driven disk rides on a spring loaded carriage that you move back and forth with the shift lever, so it's a CVT friction type of drive.
The rubber disk drives a shaft that goes into a chain case with a sprocket gear reduction, like a bike chain. Then the output shaft of the chaincase is the input shaft of the transaxle/differential unit.
In the transaxle, the input shaft goes to an intermediate shaft with a chain drive, then there are a couple of gears and sprockets, I think another intermediate shaft, then the axle shaft with the diffy's gear cluster.
What I figured out without disassembling it yet: the drive doesn't transfer from the input shaft to the first intediate shaft. So it has to be a broken chain or stripped sprocket at the top of the transaxle. I have been asking around Mytractorforum and Lawnsite for who knows how to dig into these old Snappers, but no good answers yet. Guess I'll have to buy an old repair manual on Fleabay.
I pushed the tractor back under the tarp by the woodpile. I'll work on it this winter when I have the time and ambition again. Gotta put in the fall garden vegetables first and deal with the rest of this season's mowing and yard work.
Thanks for asking, hope you weren't bored with the long story.
