With all of the big projects going on at our homestead, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the day to day tasks that need to be taken care of. Mowing the lawn is one of them. We spent the better part of the summer building an enclosed yard for the dogs to enjoy, but that requires a great deal of mowing. In the future, we’re looking at reseeding the lawn so that it’s primarily grass. At the moment, it’s still hay from it’s previous life as a hayfield.
Once we had gotten to a point where it became necessary to cut the hay, we turned to the John Deere GX325 riding lawnmower. My dad had used this riding lawnmower over the past 20 years to maintain his own lawn, and I was certain that it would be up to the task for our needs. However, we ran into some issues. With a bit of troubleshooting, and even more research, we determined that the PTO clutch needed replacement. The PTO clutch engages off the driveshaft and spins the mower deck. Since the mower deck was not functioning, it was as simple as replacing the PTO clutch. Now, this can normally run $500 or so to have done, but we opted to do it ourselves.
Finding a replacement part for half of the repair cost, we were able to drop the old PTO clutch and install the replacement. This took a little finesse, but at the end of the day we have a functioning mower and we saved a bit of money. Now the mower is available for cutting the grass as well as any other task we can throw at it.