Lawn Tractor Transaxle 415663

tom3

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Power Plant I used to work in we called it a Reeves drive. Cast iron, stainless steel, leather/fabric riveted belt with wood slats. Ran 24/7 for 40 years or so with a new belt every 5 or 6 years. Old tech that really works, but maybe not so long with the new designs.
 

PTmowerMech

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Actually Tom it is a brilliant piece of engineering using different materials to their full potential.
It is in reality nothing more than a vari-drive unit re-enginered.
The plastic housings require no machining if moulded properly and will come out of the mould to a tollerance of 0.0001".
Weather it works in service will depend upon just how good the engineering was that went into the design.
The part that wears and thus limits the service life is a single belt that is easily replacable and the variators which are also bolt on units.
No reason to ever split the box.
The Europeans have been using them in their RER's for near 20 years.
However restrictions placed upon them by the bastions of free trade ( the USA Government ) meant that you could not get them till they were made in a USA factory.
Just about all of the RER's down here have been using them for decades.

They only advantage that a hydro has over them is transmitting a lot of torque at very low speeds , some thing that a mower is never needing to do.
The hydro drives we are used to working with date back to the 50's when tractors started getting big engines but were having problems getting that power to the wheels without massive gearboxes with 6' diameter bull gears.
These got scaled down and made substantially cheaper to meet the LOW price demands of the mower market.

In the manual it explains how to adjust these. But I can't make heads or tails of exactly what I'm supposed to be adjusting.
Page 26. Right side.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/497329/Craftsman-917-289081.html?page=26#manual
 
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