I planned to do some work on my bucket this evening, and I really needed to mow the lawn this afternoon. So rather than remove the loader, then mow, then reinstall the loader, I thought I should just go ahead and mow with The Little Green Demon. (You may recall my post about the Deere 175Hydro that liked to scalp grass and DIDN'T like to turn. Let's call him LGD for short.)
Based on some advice from DavidBarkey, I did get the deck height sorted, so it doesn't scalp anymore. And I need to mow, and it has a full tank of gas and it's just SITTING there, so why not mow with it.
Which I began doing. And it was going great until I was mowing in between the exposed roots of a tree. I've been mowing over and around those roots for 15 years, first with a LH discharge Case 442, and now with a RH discharge Ingy. The ride is bouncy through there, but I hardly notice.
But the LGD didn't care for it at all. I bounced over one root and for some reason lurched to a sudden halt, whereupon a belt started squealing and the engine bogged down and died. So I killed the PTO and started it back up and when I went to turn the PTO back on, squealing belt, engine bogging. My blades were stuck. So I hopped off and looked underneath, and one of the big springs that you have to snap in place when mounting the deck was bent at a funny angle and just hanging down. I tried to re-hook it, but I needed tools for sure.
So I drove up by the shop and laid down to have a good look and realized that I really needed better access. There is only about 1 inch of travel between deck fully down and deck fully up.
So I got out my new shop equipment, I'm thinking about patenting it. I'm pretty sure every Deere owner should have one: A Little Green Demon Lift.
P.S. I got the spring snapped back in place, but I couldn't manually spin the blades. That's when I realized that the corner of the deck at the front edge of the discharge chute had snagged the root. The root had bent the deck shell back far enough that the blade tip embedded into it. So I grabbed some really big channel locks and bent the deck shell back outward. The blades could now spin, and I took the LGD off the lift and finished mowing with it.
Boy, have I been spoiled by my Case/Ingy's!
Bob
