Custom Mower Deck Rehab

The mower deck for my Custom needed a long overdue going over. Here are some pictures of the work I did to it.

The first issue I had to address was the actuator shaft. When the shaft rotates in the mount, it wears grooves into the shaft. I tried welding one to fill in the grooves but I wasn't happy with the results. My alternative was to use flanged bronze bushings. The bushings have a 5/8"OD, so I had to enlarge the holes in the mount for the bushings.




The other problem I had was with the idler arm. Whenever I disengaged the deck, the idler arm would hit the deck drive shaft and was wearing a groove into the drive shaft and idler arm.




I decided to use a 1/2" bolt mounted to the deck to stop the idler arm from rotating forward enough to hit the drive shaft.






I stripped off the old paint, cleaned off the rust on the underside and repainted the deck. I primed the whole deck with Rust-Oleum Rust Reformer. I was going to paint it the original white but when I saw the black primer, I thought black would look HOT! I painted the underside with 3 coats of gloss gray enamel and I did the top with 3 coats of flat black and 3 clear coats. The pictures don't really do it justice. It turned out better than I imagined it would when I started. I replaced all of the original hardware with stainless hardware. I bought all of the warning decals from Sears. They are from a 52" commercial mower.

I have no idea why the pictures didn't display in my post. If anybody can help me figure that out, I'd sure appreciate it.

Thanks,
Mike

I figured out how to get the pics to work. Here are a couple before I put it on the tractor and used it.

Great job on the deck! Thanks for sharing.

Spence

I tried "Slip Paint"on the underside of my mower deck. It is paint that is about the consistancy of a milk shake and has a lot of graphite in it for slippryness. It worked somewhat to keep grass from building up on the bottom of the deck, but what works best is getting the deck raked properly (1/4" to 3/8" lower in front) and never, never mow wet grass.

did you have any luck finding blades for this deck. and what did the center hole look like?