All decked out...

[The Chairman]

All decked out...​

I've abused this mower since I bought it almost 4 years ago. The growth was way over my head in places, and it took my friend and I a few months to get through it all. Now it looks like a huge lawn! Unfortunately, the deck has taken most of the abuse. I lost the baffles over a year ago, and when I welded the cracks around the blade hubs, it warped it like mad. The right blade was lower than the deck and that caused huge feeding problems and the blades are cutting on different planes. So, I chucked up $1065.00 (with tax) and got a new bare deck. My nephew helped, so transferring all of the accouterments was quick and easy. The big hang-up was when I went to rebuild the hubs. For whatever reason, I bought 6 202ff bearings, which would be great if it was an alternator. Grrrrrr. I had to wait overnight to go get the 205ff bearings. Then I found that one had only one shield and another was mispackaged. Grrrrrrrr. In addition to the aftermarket bearings, I also added 3 blades, 3 anti-scalp wheels (which I set to the lower holes), a left belt cover, and a chute cover.

Shiny!​

Funny thing, I ordered the deck on a Tuesday. I decided to get one more mow with the old deck. About a half-hour into the mow, I noticed I was really gouging on the right side. I looked at all the links, thinking I had broken one but found that I had ripped the bracket right off of the deck instead! Normally, I would pull out the TIG and reattach, but the new deck was due the next day. I decided I would not bother and took a break instead. Well, I worked on my nephew's truck as we're doing a head job on it.

The missing link...​

This was an easy, easy fix, albeit an expensive one. It took about a half-hour for my nephew and me to strip the old deck and put most of the new deck together. After I got the correct bearings, I spent another 45 minutes putting the rest of it together without the help of my nephew. I couldn't find the pin for the chute cover, so I used a 7"x 3/8" carriage bolt. In the past, I used a 2.5" block to gauge blade height at "G". I moved it from pin to pin until I got it right. This time, I used 4 blocks which really sped things up. I really should have sprung for new idler bearings. I certainly felt just a tad of play in it one and I don't want to mess with this for a while. Other than that, the whole thing was a piece of cake. Crumb cake at that. The cut is super flat and it's obvious the blades cut better when on the same plane. I had very few "misses", even on Bahia. Also, I usually mow my 10.83 acres North to South and have to cross over my dirt road driveway 20 times or more. In the past, I had many, many scalps every time I mowed. This past mow I had only 2 scalps and they really weren't that bad. Boy, that road looks much, much nicer now and so does my Raptor.

 

[The Chairman]

I just ordered the three idler pulleys from Byrds in Lafayette County. They have them all in stock. I also ordered ten 205FF bearings from Amazon. I get about 75 hours out of a set of bearings, so I'll be changing these again in September.

 

[The Chairman]

I did not expect the new deck to affect mowing times. It usually takes me a bit more than 7.5 hours to mow it all. I just did it under 6 hours. That was a nice bonus. Now I need to find out where I didn't mow!!!