Toro ZT mower back in business after deck rebuild!

What I expected would be a one hour project turned into days, then weeks, then months.

In this brief video I give a snapshot recap of my problems and efforts to put my mower back into service after working through a series of issues which began with idler pulley bearing failures but didn't stop there.

A longer in depth video is planned to follow this one, to describe how I rebuilt and repainted the deck.

Key points in the journey...

An idler pulley bearing failed and shredded the belt. So I removed the deck from the mower. At first I hoped I would have to replace only that one part, but further examination revealed that the bearings in the other pulleys and the spindles were well worn and needed replacing as well. Then I noticed how bad the rust was on the sheet metal and decided that it needed to be stopped before it ruined the entire deck.

There was quite a bit of preparing and conditioning required in order to perform the painting.

The mounting bolts for the spindles were too long, so I had to cut the excess off.

I created a custom lock guard for the deck hangers to prevent the deck from dismounting whenever I mow my berms or ditches and such - something that most people mowing flat lawns would never experience, but something that has been a problem for me for many years.

After remounting the deck and installing the belt, the blades lost velocity then wouldn't spin at all. So I had to troubleshoot the belt and the power take off clutch.

As I build my content library,, I am focusing first on quality of content and then secondly working to improve my production value. Thank you for watching my videos in the meantime. I hope that if you are interested in zero turn mowers that you will enjoy them. There are many other topics in which I am interested, but this is my starting point!