Brief up date

I put the new bearings in the rear transmission and reassembled the transmission.  It was suppose to snow the night I was putting it together so I stayed up until 2:00am putting the tractor back together. I was so excited to start it up and test out all of my repairs when the battery was totally dead.  It was so dead that the battery charger kept kicking off.  I am going to try to put some resistance in the circuit tonight to see if I can get it to take a charge before replacing it. 

It did snow but only about 2 1/2" so not enough to push around yet.  I am really excited to see the improved range of motion in the blade assembly. Before the repairs it had a range of about 4 or 5 inches.  I expect it to have more then 12" now!  We will soon see.

I also ordered new decals for the whole tractor.  They should arive in about 2 weeks. Maybe by then I will have most of it painted and ready for them to go on.

Tonight I hope to get out there and take the blade apart and remove a bolken bolt and contuine cleaning. Getting it ready for some paint soon!  It is so dirty, greasy, and rusty.  Lots to do before primer can go on.

Paint Soon

I visited our local Paint Store and picked up all that I need for painting.  Wow, it is not cheap.  I figure if I have went to this much trouble to get it fixed and painted, I might as well do it right. 

I really want my grand kids to be able to appreciate this piece of equipment.  I hope to start painting this weekend.  I have lots of cleaning and preparing to do to make that happen. 

This is a fun picture of my homemade rotor tiller. 

Yeah, I can just hear the redneck jokes. 

It worked really well. 

Fixing Jammed Transmission Shifting Handle

The main reason I had to take the PowerKing completely apart was because while pushing snow last year my transmission would not shift out of gear.  This was not good because I had just pushed a huge pile of snow across the highway that I live on into a huge ditch.  Well, now here I was stuck in the middle of the highway and I could only drive forward with a deep ditch in front of me.  I had to turn the engine off and run to get my truck to pull it out of the highway.  Luckily the roads were very bad and only a couple of cars had to stop while I was trying to chain it up to my truck. 

This is the process of fixing the front transmission.  I have already done this to the back transmission. Which took forever because I had never disassembled the shifting assembly before. 

Remove the assembly from the gear casing.

I mounted mine in a vise so that I could hammer and work on it.

This is with the transmission in the neutral position and the handle toward 1 and 2

This is neutral in the center.

These plugs simply push out with the guide rod when you gently tap them out.

Loosen the set screw.  There is a compression spring and a ball behind this screw.  There is another ball on the other side and an oblonged ball in the center.  Be sure to have all of these balls and springs in place before re assembly. 
They can make there way out and get lost if you are not careful.

Gently tap the first shifter and rod this direction first.  This makes room for the roll pin to be removed.

Punch out roll pin.

Make sure that the pin can go into deep part of casting.

Use punch or long bolt to tap the rod completely out the opposite end of assembly.

Do the same thing to the next shifter assembly.

Using a flat screwdriver remove shifter capture spring.

Push shifter out this direction.

Notice the flat spots worn on side of disc.  This is why the shifter was jammed.  It would not roll up the side of the shifter assembly.  It was simply Jammed in place.

These flat spots will need to be welded up and ground back to round.

Using a hard rod weld up flat spots. It is important to build enough weld so that the disc can be ground to a round flat disc with fairly square edges.

This is what mine looked like after welding.  Lots of build up.  I used many light layers of weld with a 7018 arc rod.

Using a grinder, I ground it down to close to size.

I used the lever and slot that it needed to fit to make the final adjustments.

I kept taking a little more off until it would just fit. 

I then dressed it with a fine file to "polish" all the surfaces so that it would fit properly and slide like it is suppose to.

Just like new again.  Now to reassemble and see how well it works.  It works beautifully.  I don't ever remember it shifting so well in all of my life.  It should last another 33 years. 

Now I need to finish removing the inner bearing race from the shaft assembly from the front assembly and pick up some new bearings to replace them.  In the mean time I plan on trying to straighten the hood dents out and sand it to be ready for new paint.  I also will do this on the transmission and the covers and rear fenders.

Some more before pics



My dad had painted some of this tractor at one time.   He removed the old decals from the side and top of the hood.  I don't think he re-painted the whole tractor.  Probably just the hood.  I do remember at one time that it had some scratches and some rust from daily use.  We had lots of pine trees at our house with low hanging branches.  After years of mowing the grass close to these limbs, it put some scratches on the hood. We were not gentle with this tractor.  My dad and my brothers and I used this tractor to do lots of work, hard work that eventually lead to some bumps and scratches.  I hope to bang these out and sand the paint all down to metal and get a good coat of paint on the whole thing.  It would be awesome to get some decals to put back on the top and sides like it was when it was new.



The engine is a 14 HP Kohler.  It has been rebuilt once because it has been ran without oil, I was using it at the time but I am sure that it had been ran with out oil for some time before that.  It was rebuilt in 1990.





It needs a new gas cap.  This one has needed replacing for at least 10 years.  It is worn out.

The wiring looks a lot like it did when he first got it.  I guess that Power King did not put a lot of effort on making their wiring look neat and organized. 

I hope to replace much of these wires and re-route them to look neater and put them inside sleeves to protect them. 

Notice the black tar on the side of the transmission cover.  This is from re surfacing my dad's asphalt driveway for many years. Every now and then a little would end up on the tractor.