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I picked this mower up on the side of the road, someone was throwing it away. I have never restored a mower but I figure this is a great start. I just wanted to track my progress and get input from people who may have a mower like mine. My progress now is that I have disassembled most of the mower but not including the drivetrain and pulleys underneath the seat. If anyone could help later on where to get parts and, how to tell if they are bad. I have attached some random photos of my progress so far. If anyone knows how to get to the internals that would be very helpful, as I want to see if the motor is even good! I hope you guys enjoy my rebuild/restore and don't see it as a boring post. because ei plan to put a good amount of work into it!:thumbsup:
Carb:

Post disassembly

Battery box/rust

Seat

Motor/motor cover

Pulleys underneath seat

:thumbsup: Looks like a good project, good luck.

Thanks, hopefully as soon as I get the ignition switch in, I will be able to fire it up!

First, get the correct keyswitch!!!!! Get the tractor's engine and tractor's model/serial numbers as well. Take a pic of the terminals of the keyswitch to get the correct one. There are letters stamped for the correct wiring schematic.

Wow, the NSA could run your identity from that fingerprint!!!

got it in the mail today man!

Fish said:

First, get the correct keyswitch!!!!! Get the tractor's engine and tractor's model/serial numbers as well. Take a pic of the terminals of the keyswitch to get the correct one. There are letters stamped for the correct wiring schematic.

Click to expand...

got the motor fired up! took me awhile (had to keep taking it and out of park). the starter wouldn't turn over sometimes and as soon as I mnoved the shifter around it would start to turn over again. I got it to run alittle longer than this but didn't want to chance it, seeing as I don't know what kind of condition the engine is in. heres the vid though:

Sorry for the lack of updates. I have been pretty busy with school and what not. I have had time here and there for the last year to work on the mower. and it is coming along slowly but surely. I even have a lead on two mowers some guy wants to sell that are exactly like mine. So all of them together I should be able to get one badass mower running.
This was some work done on the hood, stripping it down and filling little dents with bondo.

Updated pics after I stripped it down to the frame and sanded primed and painted the frame and back seat brackets

Motor covers with new paint!

Nice job on the body but bodo will not hold up on a mower hood, too many vibes and too much flexing.
Dents have to be knocked out with a hammer & dolly it is a lot easier than it looks if done slowly with light taps.

As this is your first try you get a lot of slack, but you are approaching this project in exactly the wrong order.
You start with the mechanical , get the engine to run, get the mower to run, then you pull it down and do the cosmetics.
Same general proceedure with a mower , motorcycle, or car.
Simple reasons The enine could be totally unrepairable so you have put in all that time & money to find you need a new engine.
Rmoving major parts like engines , clutchs & pulleys usually damage fresh paint work so it has to be touched up or worse redone.

Apart for repairning mowers for a living, I ride & restore vintage motorcycles.

So starting with the engine,
Try to turn it over with plug in.
It should go hard, soft very hard hard then soft again , hard as the valve springs compress then very hard on compression.
This is not very scientific but worth doing to ensure every thing is working.
Remove the head on the engine and press hard on the piston while rotating the engine, it should move up & down evenly with no clicks or binding.
If either of them are felt a full strip down will be needed if the motor is repairable at all.
Check the coil for spark, without the head on you can turn over the engine quite fast so should get a really good and easily visible spark.
You can do all this with the engine in place in fact I find it easier to work on the engines in place however you will have to remove both of the belts from the front pulley
If you have the funds buy a manual for the engine and another for the mower.
The mower manual is available on line from MTD and the manual will be in your local library or get one of the CD's / DVDs all over evilbay.
Even better is the Must have manual 2 available from here"K&T Parts House Lawn Mower Parts and Chain Saw & Trimmer Parts"
Your motor is called an L head by Briggs & Stratton so you want the L Head manual.From memory it is also available from the same site just work back to the main menu and then go to the Briggs section.

Next pull the deck off, tie some rope around the front axel and hoist the mower up vertically so you can get to the underside realy easily.
Have a good look and get some one else to work all the controls while you are watching to see what each one does.
The speed control on this mower works by moving the centre of a pair of pulleys ( top of the bottom pulley & bottom of the top pulley ) and these wear badly and are very expensive to have a shop replace as it takes a long time to fit & adjusts so the labour costs make it uneconomic to repair, but good for you.
When the transmission starts to play up most owners toss their MTD's when they recover from the shock of the repair bill.
Get this down pat and you will have a source of income rebuilding & selling MTD mowers, there are a lot of them out there and you can pick them up for peanuts ( as you have just found out ). Bad news is you must use genuine MTD belts ( not cheap ) on this system as they are different from standard belts.
Seats are very expensive I replace bad seats with boat seats which ar quite cheap , actually more comfortable and have drain holes so don't get waterlogged.

Bert is right on with his advice, get the machine in good working order first. Then make it pretty, I'm doing the same thing as you , and they never made service manuals for my brand of mower so a lot of my work is trial and error ..... but for me , thats the fun part , you can see ( on this site ) my ALBUMS ... ( My Project & My Project Part 2 ) and get an idea where I'm at . BEFORE I buy any new parts I try to fix what I've got to work with , or find a good used part , buying new is my last resort. My mower is up & running but the deck is going to take some considerabl work AND money !!! I live outside of Ocala, Fl. and have located a couple of " mower graveyards " just hoping maybe I'll run across a deck in better shape than mine. Anyway what you've done looks great, keep us up - dated , best of luck ................. Boobala .....:thumbsup:

Hey guys,
Thanks for the input. I made sure everything was working good before I started the paint work. The biggest problem I have is that the stator is not recharging the battery and I have no voltage to the headlight wires. I found a guy around me that has my exact mower and he wants to sell it but I'll I really want is the wiring harness and he kinda flaked out. I tried figuring out what the stator is connected to but can't figure out how to test it. For the most part everything is mechanically strong so I started on some of the paint work so it can cure really well before it gets put back together.

Gotta go back to work though, thanks again

Lookin good, keep up the good work & you will have a fine machine. :thumbsup: