95-36MS01 36" Mower Deck Rebuild

[BradKahler 276]

When I bought my B80 it came with a front dozer blade and a 36" mower deck.  The deck was in pretty sad shape, all three spindles were worn out and frozen, and the rear of the shell was open and it had a cobbled together side discharge chute.  The deck model number is 95-36MS01 which is supposed to be a side discharge. I don't know why the back was missing, but it was pretty obvious that the side chute had been reworked rather poorly.  

 

For my use I need a rear discharge so I took on the task of converting it to rear discharge.  I put an ad in the Wanted section for anyone that might have a section of deck available and got no responses.  So, I ended up using pieces of shell from the rusted out 36" deck from my 1966 656.  The decks weren't really the same but I was about to cut various sections out and piece them together to eliminate the side discharge opening.  This is what it looked like before I started.

 

 

 

This is the deck I robbed piece from.  The actual curved section was remarkably close to the 42" deck only the sides were taller. 

 

 

 

After a bunch of "custom" art work I ended up with the following:

 

 

 

 

Is it pretty?  No.  Will it work?  I think so.  It's not going to be a full time mower, I needed something smaller than my 5' ztr to mow between a line of trees and a fence.  

 

I have all the parts for rebuilding the three spindles thanks to a couple of forum members, so the next task is to assemble and install the spindles.

 

The bearings that I bought have seals on both sides.  This deck will not be used more than a half dozen times a year for maybe 60 minutes each time.  Would there be any reason to not just leave the bearing seals in place and forgo greasing through the spindles?  

 

I should add, I found a NOS rear chute on ebay and will be installing it as well.

 

 

Thanks!

 

Brad

 

Edited 17 hours ago by BradKahler

[8ntruck 8,750]

Looks serviceable.  What kind of welder did you use?

[ri702bill 11,754]

1 hour ago, BradKahler said:

The bearings that I bought have seals on both sides.  This deck will not be used more than a half dozen times a year for maybe 60 minutes each time.  Would there be any reason to not just leave the bearing seals in place and forgo greasing through the spindles?  

 

Nice work so far.

Seals - some folks opt to pop off the inboard side seals, exposing the ball area so you can externally grease the.

Others remove both seals temporarily to flush the supplied grease(?) and repack with a Lucas grease. Then replace the seals. A better non greaseable bearing. Your choice.

[BradKahler 276]

12 hours ago, ri702bill said:

 

Nice work so far.

Seals - some folks opt to pop off the inboard side seals, exposing the ball area so you can externally grease the.

Others remove both seals temporarily to flush the supplied grease(?) and repack with a Lucas grease. Then replace the seals. A better non greaseable bearing. Your choice.

 

Thanks for the info.  I think I'll pull a seal to see what the grease looks like and if it seems decent I'll pull one seal for each bearing and go that route.  Otherwise I'll clean the grease out and put one seal back on.

 

 

[BradKahler 276]

13 hours ago, 8ntruck said:

Looks serviceable.  What kind of welder did you use?

 

I have an old Hobart Beta Mig 200.  It's a nice heavy duty industrial quality welder.