What is the cause of this? I'm getting ready to take the deck off soon to look but wondering what I'm gonna be up against. https://youtu.be/FJUwct7PiUA
#2
ILENGINE
You either have a bad, burnt, missing section of transmission drive belt, or a flat spot on an idler pulley. The spring loaded idler pulley which is attached to the clutch pedal is trying to take of the slack of the bad area, and then hits regular belt, pulley and create a violent pedal movement effect.
Sounds like a simple fix. Now Im more motivated to dig in. Think I'll wait until it get a little cooler around here and then get after it. Thanks so much for the reply. I appreciate it.
Double ditto on that.
Get two or three of these every season.
Funniest one I ever got was a fuel cap fell off got stuck in the clutch pulleys , wore one right down to the center steel bushing.
What I can not believe is the customer lost the cap and ran the mower for 2 seasons with a soda bottle over the filler hole before he called me in for a "service".
Ended up costing $ 350 including the replacement cap.
Well I'm not going to lie. I pulled the deck off tonight to get a better look at the drive belt and with the motor running and looking under there I could see the belt really flopping around but the pulleys looked fine.
The belt appears fine but is it stretched out too much?
Belts do not stretch, actually they shrink during use.
They wear thinner so sit deeper in the V grooves and get slack.
So a sudden slackening in the belt means that some thing is wrong.
The fixed clutch pulley should be in a slot, check it has not become loose, or for that matter fallen right off.
Check that the belt is actually runing in all of the pulley grooves and not on a shaft.
Most oft seen at the rear.
Go to the Sears web site and print out the parts drawing for the transmission and make sure all the bits are there.
Unless you recently changed the belt for the wrong sized one, you have a problem.
You can not check the pulleys by looking at them running, you have to remove the belt and check each pulley.
I like to hoist the mower up by the front axels till it is standing on its butt so I can get to everything easily.
If you do the same, drain the fuel tank first & remove the battery.
Being a Craftsman it can have any one of a dozen transmission lay outs depending upon what actually made it so If you want specific help either post a lot of photos or better still post the model numbers
