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Le Sueur VIA St.Thomas | Many years ago I took an IH 240 'Pay-Tractor' with a JD 3 pt finish mower and converted it to a belly mower... for a while. We had the same problem with rotation; We looked briefly for a mid-pto, but IH dealers only laughed at me when I inquired about buying one. Apparently they are hard to find. We decided to start building instead.
We got a sprocket that mounted directly to the pto. We fabricated a heavy plate to act as a mount for the driven sprocket and idler. We achieved reverse rotation by reversing the locations of the driven sprocket and the idler. We now had a shaft at the middle of the tractor that spun the right way!! It ended up taking more than 1 idler to get enough wrap on the driven sprocket, but we got it working. We had a chain guard, but couldn't really fabricate an oil bath...
Fast forward about a year. Things still worked, but it was a bit high maintenance. I was mowing one day (a lot of mowing, heavy grass) and just happened to look back at the chain, as we had removed the guard for some reason. The chain (80 or Dbl 80) was cherry red!
We had greased/oiled it on occasion, but we decided at that point it was the beginning of the end. We rewelded the mower back into it's original configuration and bought a woods deck for it. That stupid little belt lasted a long time if you kept everything aligned.
good luck -jim | |
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changing drive shaft rotation
