Craftsman Rescue

ollo_ollo · Jun 8, 2003

A Co-worker gave me this 42" 6 speed Craftsman on the off chance I might be able to repair it. It has the B&S 15 horse Said she was just mowing along when it stopped suddenly & wouldn't go again. They went out & bought a new Sears garden tractor. I found the entire motor and front portion lower body black with oily dirt, grass & grime. The motor had seized from lack of lubrication. The oil pan bolts had vibrated loose & 1 was missing altogether. It couldn't run without quickly loosing oil. I removed the mower deck, cleaned & then removed the engine & began to disassemble it expecting to find 1 or more broken parts but when I was removing the pulley, the shaft turned a little. I added a good dose of oil through the sparkplug hole & manually turned the engine through several revolutions then resealed & rebolted the bottom pan. Reinstalled the engine, added fresh oil, changed the air filter & fired it up. Started immediately with huge clouds of blue smoke. After about 2 minutes, the smoke cleared & it ran fine without a trace of smoke. I rode it around without the deck for a few days & everything worked fine. The motor sounds great & there is just a puff of blue smoke at startup, probably some valve guide wear(understandable given it's history of neglect). I then spent a couple hours cleaning up the deck & reattaching it. It mows fine now but there is some noise which seems to be coming from the big drive pulley for the mower deck. It makes the noise all the time & it sounds worse when the mower is not engaged. When idling with the mower disengaged, you can see the belt kind of bouncing in & out by the pulley. Could this be caused by an old, glazed belt or what? Since everything works fine & the noise is definitely not an engine noise but coming from the belt & pulley interaction, should I just ignore it? Don

s1120 · Jun 9, 2003

Good job. I like to hear about trash being fixed up, and put back to use. Kind of recycling. /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif

As to your noise. I bet you have an idle pully somewere that has a bad bearing. Try removing the belt, and turning each pully by hand. I bet you find your problem. Good luck.

ollo_ollo · Jun 9, 2003

Thanks Paul:
The answer turned out to be even simpler. It was something I did. There was some kind of a pulley guard (it looks a little like one of the dough hooks on my wife's Kitchenaid mixer). I had incorrectly mounted it & it had begun rubbing on the edge of the upper pulley. Just happened to coincide with mounting the mower deck.
Live & learn, Don H