Lawnflite 703 Autodrive CVT belt and bearing replacement

So it has been a long and wet winter, and the ground had taken forever to be dry enough to actually mow without the mower getting stuck in the mud. Alas that meant that the grass was now very long, and wet. Normally this means a really frustrating first mow of the year - with the collection system repeatedly clogging. However this time I had a plan, by cobbling together a grass deflector, setting the cut height as high as possible, and mowing really slowly, I can cut and dump all the grass back onto the ground without a clog. Leave that to dry out a bit, and use a "tow behind" sweeper to collect the grass. That all worked ok. Then it rained again, and again... so rinse a repeat a couple of weeks later.

Noisy

This time I noticed that the mower was making more noise than normal. Usually having the blades running make it quite a bit louder, but this was louder just driving about, even without cutting. However, I managed another cut'n'drop, which took a few hours, and then finally set about the sweep up the mess phase. Here the plan unravelled, as having got no further than 5m into th sweeping, the mower simply stopped. No drive forward or backward, and the accelerator peddle was flapping about in the breeze and no longer springing up when released. The obvious suspect was a broken drive belt, as after all I had noticed that after 16 years or so, they were looking like they were on their last legs. Spares had been ordered and were ready waiting. Alas the enthusiasm to start fixing it on Sunday evening wasnot there, so at that point I pushed it off the lawn and waited for a flash of enthusiasm to go an investigate later.

Diagnosis

Surprisingly the knackered belts were still hanging on. The first obvious "fault" however was a vee belt pulley, that really looked like it should be attached to something was in fact laying in the bottom of the mower transmission. There is a bearing housing bolted to the frame of the mower that looked like it should be holding the shaft sticking out of the top of the pulley. In fact the retaining screw at the top of the shaft was still resting on top of the bearing housing. Checking that showed that the bolt was not broken, and the threads on both shaft and bolt looked good - it had just come undone for some reason. Checking the bearing, if felt rather rough. Unbolting the bearing housing revealed two 6203-2RSR C3 bearings (40mm OD, 17mm ID, 12mm thickness). The bottom one was "ok ish" but felt rough and had some slop in it. The top one was another storey though. The seals had come off it, the ball race metalwork had broken up, and a few of the balls had made a getaway! That kind of explains the extra noise. It also looked a bit discoloured from heat. The vibration had probably shaken the retaining bolt free. New bearings were ordered from bearingboys.co.uk.

Fixing it

Since there were new belts waiting, it made sense to replace those at the same time as the bearings. Not a particularly difficult job, but a bit of a pain all the same. Also most of the guides I could find online and on youtube seemed to cater for different models with different transmission layouts. Hence this guide in case anyone else finds themselves in the same situation.

Disassembly

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