Next thing I wanted to do was inspect the engine and tranny. The tranny is one of those crappy Foote 5 speeds and since this mower is over 20 years old, I figured I aught to at least change the grease. I plan on using this tranny until I can get a better one, like a peerless. Anyhow, this was one of those little projects that I thought would take 30 minutes but took ALL DAY. First of all, I don't think these are intended to ever be taken apart. They are glued together with rubber cement, so once all the bolts came out, it would not come apart short of beating it to death. So I used a trick grandpa taught me- pour boiling water on it! That loosened up the glue just enough so that I could slowly pry screwdrivers all around until it came apart.
I took the cover off and some ball bearings fell into the grease! took me 30 minutes to find them and once I did, I had no idea where they went. The model number was faded and when I looked up foote trannys online, there was literally 200 different models. So I guessed they went on top of 2 springs. That was correct luckily.
Next I had to get all that old, hard grease outta' there. I thought about calling up Mike Rowe from 'Dirty Jobs' because this was NASTY business. It took an hour to get all that goop out of there. I then filled it with Hi-temp synthetic grease. It was bright red,so when done, it looked like I had ground a rabbit up in there. Ummmmmm!
Then when I put it back together, 3 of the holes stripped out, which meant retapping and finding bolts that would fit. Anyhow, got it back on the mower. This tranny seems overly complicated. We'll see how much it will take out on the track before it blows. Next time I think about changing the grease, I'll just buy a used tranny somewhere else. Lesson learned!
