Well, you can call me incredibly brave, or incredibly stupid. Either way I’m having a bit of fun.
I’ve got this Foote 4360-7 transaxle I got as a freebie. It was a factory refurb trans that my local small engine guy has had sitting around his shop for years. So off I went.
When I was cleaning out all the grease on thing I noticed was that the bottom half of the housing is machined to accept a bearing on the axle. The top half however, is not, despite having the casting for it. Why it’s built this way is beyond me, but anyway, I digress.
After watching a doc sprocket vid he had mentioned adding bearings to a certain peerless that had the machining but no bearings installed stock. And it got me thinking about adding bearings to my 4360.
So, the crazy me pulled out my calipers, and my dremel and got to work.
After measuring a dozen times at a dozen points I carefully marked out where the new slot needed to be to line up with the bottom half. Then I started with my 3/8” cutter on its side using the dremel collar as a guide on the trans. This got me started without cutting too deep so I could see how “feasible” it was going to be. I then moved on to a 1” cutting disc and cut straight down into the housing just inside my slot side marks. This would give me a little bit of room to work within the lines without cutting into the outermost edges.
Next I moved back to the 3/8” high speed cutter bit. I kind of found a rhythmic motion of back and forthing cutting a little at a time with each pass. I was basically trying to mimic what a CNC would do.
Once I started to get some depth, I rechecked all my points against the factory slots to make sure I wasn’t over cutting.
I stopped 1/2mm shy of my final measurements on all points to allow me to adjust once I pick up bearings tomorrow. I didn’t want to end up needing to shift left or right and then end up with slop in the bearing. Otherwise what’s the point?
Now that I was at my depth, I pulled out the 1” sanding wheel from my kit and ran that in the slot to smooth everything out.
It surprisingly turned out quite nice. Still need to shave the last little bit out but that will be once the bearings can be test fitted.
I have pics, but despite resizing, converting to png etc, I still can’t seem to upload and post them.