[Cjet69]

About a year and a half ago I had this same thing happen to the 6x4 Gator. The bolt that holds the drive pulley on the transaxle broke. Last time I just swapped transaxles from our other gator to get us back up and running. see Gator trouble | Green Tractor Talk . I had purchased a used input shaft to swap out so now we are forced to get it done. The replacement shaft has a larger bolt in it which I found there were 2 different sizes when I looked at the parts book. We got the trans split and the old shaft out yesterday. Now we need to clean things up, reassemble, and swap this transaxle out. Hopefully this will fix the problem this time.

 

[pede]

Curios as to why you split the case and not try to ezout the broken bolt?

 

[Cjet69]

Curios as to why you split the case and not try to ezout the broken bolt?

Because the splines have a lot of wear and the replacement shaft uses the larger bolt which we are hoping will prevent breakage in the future.

 

[Zebrafive]

Because the splines have a lot of wear and the replacement shaft uses the larger bolt which we are hoping will prevent breakage in the future.

A lot more work, but that's how I would fix it too. Good you had the replacement shaft with the larger bolt.

 

[Old Cajun]

Because the splines have a lot of wear

Wonder if the worn splines led to the bolt shearing?

 

[Cjet69]

Wonder if the worn splines led to the bolt shearing?

I think the wear occurred when the pulley was running about half way off the shaft before we caught the problem. The splines in the pulley really got trashed during the first bolt breakage, this time we caught it before any real damage occurred.

 

[Cjet69]

A lot more work, but that's how I would fix it too. Good you had the replacement shaft with the larger bolt.

With the old shaft out we were able to chuck it in the lathe and drill out the broken bolt. We turned the lathe at a really slow speed with lots of lube to keep the bit cool while drilling the hard bolt. Doing this in the lathe helps keep the bit centered to help prevent damaging the threads. Now that we see this method work we can try it on the other shaft with the good splines.

 

[Cjet69]

Got the Gator back up and runnin'. Everything worked good on the test drive. We are now tearing into the trans that we just pulled. This one is dirtier inside than the other. Its going to get a good cleaning before putting it back together.