Hi, new member here. First of all, THANK YOU! for this post. I purchased my WE261 in April 2010. At this point, I believe I have been through all of the common repairs with it. It recently lost reverse and I saw no more adjustment room on the gear lever. So, inspired by your post and figuring it was worth a try versus the $300 WeedEater solution, i purchased an MTD disc and spent about 7 hours yesterday putting it in. Getting the existing disc out was a bear! I had not joined the group until today so I hadn't seen your pictures. Turns out, I installed my disc in the opposite orientation as you; I thought that orientation was closer to the OE style. As different as the two discs were, I was VERY skeptical that the mower would actually run correctly, but a quick test run around the yard and I had my Reverse back, no movement in Neutral (with the OE disc the mower would occassionally still move forward while in Neutral), none of the typical "clatter", and smooth Forward gears. This was with blades engaged or disengaged. Needless to say, I'm thrilled and anxious to cut a lawn (I use the mower for my yard and my daughter's; about 3/4 acre all together).
I do have two questions though:
1. How has this solution been holding up for you?
2. Did you have the same type of OE disc as I did? I'm not sure that they didn't change the transmission design during the production run of these things. My OE disc was a five part design. From the mounting point out it had: (a) a solid back plate, (b) a soft spacer ring, (c) an inner disc, (d) a flexible clutch type band wrapped around the inner disc "c", and (e) an outer disc with the actual friction material that contacted the drive disc; this mated to the inner disc "c" with the clutch band "d" in between the two.
For those of you who used the Snapper disc, I'm curious, was your replacement similar to the MTD or to my OE disc? And, how has the snapper disc been doing for you?
