OutdoorKing Repair Forum Forums Repairs and Maintenance Questions On Ride On Mowers Questions on Greenfield Ride On Mower Frames Greenfield mk2 E2000 16-32 - Swap Cutter Deck

Alright here we go.
1st can we swap/change cutting deck size?


As you can see my 32" deck is in bad shape.
2. Lot of slipping especially up hill and slow to take off. Driving Belt? . Looks twisted.(didn't checked for extra ratchet yet.)



3.blades doesn't disengage.
4. Can we adjust hand brake?
It seems to work when fully pulled but not when secured in place.
I need to remove all body part to panel beat them. So I will try to take more pick of set ups.

Hi again Jeromeo, thae same here applies as in my last post; Re: your Greenfield 8-28...Grumpy will chime in and give you the advice you need.

With regard to fitting a larger cutting deck, we will have to get input from one of our regular Greenfield repairers to tell us what will fit. The deck you have looks to be quite repairable to me, it seems to just have a few cracks that need welding, but I may be missing something.

To get the wheel-drive working properly, you will need to do some checks. I can't see the condition of the belt very clearly, but it looks as if the belt has come to pieces and will have to be replaced. Something must have caused that: perhaps overheating due to slipping, or due to a seized idler pulley.

1. You need to check the condition of the idler pulleys to see if they rotate freely and are free of wear.

2. If the wheel drive is weak/slipping in the forward direction, but works properly in reverse, you probably have loss of belt tension due to the tensioning pulley not having moved forward, or the ratchet not working properly so the pulley moves backward when you are using forward drive.

Let's start with those first couple of issues, then move on when we have them under control.

Thanks Grumpy and Deejay.
I don't specially want to fit a bigger cutting deck. It's only one option in case I can not fix this one. This will give me more chance to found 2nd hand one. Now next to the chute you have a big piece of deck missing. They patch it with some rubber. I need to remove this. Do you know which type of material deck are made from?
Once I removed the body panels I will take more pick for documentation.
Thanks again for your great advice.

I believe the deck is made from ordinary mild-steel sheet. Just measure the thickness of the adjoining sheet metal and use the same thickness.

This deck looks to be made from aluminium, as most Greenfield decks are.

Thanks Murray, that is a surprise, but I suppose it explains why so many of them crack, and are repaired by pop-riveting sheet metal across to join it up. From memory most of the deck repairs we see here seem to be steel decks (probably on other brands of mower) and lots of them have plenty of welds by the time we hear about them.

If this one were mine I'd try riveting steel plates across the cracks, using two staggered rows of pop rivets on each side. It's important to make sure the rivet heads are on the aluminium side, so the other ends of the rivets won't pull through the holes by deforming the aluminium. An alternative that has worked well for me is to put a close-fitting stainless steel washer on the expanding end of each rivet before expanding it.

Yes they look like aluminium. I found a guy on sunshine cost who repair them but its a little bit far to drive just for that. Around $250 to weld seems a bit expensive.I was thinking using aluminium checked plate and rivet to fill the gap.
Thanks for advice.

Quality welding of aluminium requires special equipment and skills. In case you care, aluminium will oxidise when molten, ruining weld strength, unless it is kept out of contact with air. This is done by a process called MIG (Masked by Inert Gas) in most countries, and Heliarc in the US. The inert gas used is normally argon everywhere but the US, and helium in the US, hence the different name. High pressure gas from a gas cylinder is blown onto the welding job from a discharge ring around the welding contact. Sometimes the filler metal is fed automatically through the contact in the form of wire, and sometimes the operator holds a rod of the metal in his/her other hand. So, not very many people are equipped or skilled to do this kind of work, and those who are can charge high prices.

I agree using thick aluminium plate for the repair, rather than steel plate, is the best way to proceed. Steel in contact with aluminium will cause the aluminium to corrode when wet (the aluminium acts as a "sacrificial anode"). Hence to make this a durable repair you not only need to repair it with aluminium plate, you also need to use aluminium rivets. There is still a problem with the stump of the steel expander inside the aluminium pop rivets (part of the expander remains in the rivet after most of it breaks off) and ideally you would drive each of these stumps out with a pin punch, but hardly anyone does, except on aircraft repairs.

MIG welding is now called 'GMAW'[for Gas-shielded Metallic Arc Welding], and the filler wire is always fed through the torch, and used to strike and run the arc.

The other common inert gas-shielded welding technique, which the Yanks refer to as heliarc, is now termed 'GTAW', for Gas-shielded Tungsten Arc [formerly known here as TIG, for 'Tungsten Inert Gas']. This uses a fixed tungsten alloy electrode in the torch for running the arc. Filler rod is fed in by hand. This is the technique of choice for aluminium repairs, as it's much more controllable. Also, it saves having to buy a large spool of wire for each alloy to be welded, as is necessary with GMA. Various shielding gas mixes are used for different metals; straight Argon is usually the choice for aluminium.

Most welding workshops will have a GTAW rig, but as grumpy says, aluminium welding is a specialist skill within the trade of welding.

Thanks for that Gadge, my only direct experience with aluminium welding was watching a serious tradesman welder doing TIG work way back in the early days, when it was still called argon-arc. That guy was a marvel at welding anything, and having known him for a time served to convince me that when you want welding done right the first time every time, you should go to someone just like him. I could barely believe some of the things he could do, routinely and in hardly any time at all.

Wire-feed gas shielded welding, which came later, always seemed to me to take more setting up and was not really convenient for small one-off repairs. However you've now filled me in on important specifics - it is very useful for our archives to get up to date and accurate information like that you have given us.