Toro 74203 mower rebuild
Kirk Dittenber (Owner)
Adam T
Aaron Cropley
patti williams
Clint Campbell
Andrew Steblein
Kramerica `1
Mark
Rebuilt this mower this spring. The mower cut and ran fine. The deck had several large holes in it. I replaced and welded in many new panels to make the deck solid. Repainted both top and bottom of deck. Of course doing all that work, I replaced all spindle bearings and gave it a new set of anti scalp rollers. The engine needed a head gasket replaced as well as a complete tear down to clean all mouse residue out.
Taking off covers I was surprised to see how much mouse nest material was present. All cooling fins and passages where completely blocked! This engine ran just fine and cut grass, but smoked very bad from the leaky head gasket. I did not expect this hot mess!
Bastards even gnawed on the wires. I had to repair the main wire harness in several places.
You can see the section of head gasket that was bad. I'm not entirely sure what was going on. This head bolt was removed with my fingers only! I know this is an original head gasket, but I find it hard to believe it left the factory being this loose. The leak was so bad that the oil was spraying out the back and onto the exhaust. There was a point it was so bad that it caught on fire and charred some of the wire cladding. Whoever owned this machine at least did a nice job keeping the oil topped off.
Parts all cleaned up. Now time to check the stator and flywheel magnets. I did test the charging system before I took it apart and it was producing voltage just fine. I also know that when these Kohler Command engines get hot the double sided tape that holds the magnets gets brittle and the magnets fall off. As I suspected, 2 magnets had let go of the flywheel and were now stuck to the stator. The system will produce voltage with only 4 magnets, but just not the full 16 amps this system is supposed to produce.
whith the flywheel removed i could check over the stator wires. Stator was good, just very dirty
I needed to remove the remaining magnets from the flywheel. After marking their orientation, I place the flywheel in my barbeque grill. Usually I read a temperature of 300* F before the adhesive softens up enough for the mags to safely be removed. This one only required 200*. Im guessing she had been run hot for quite some time to cook the adhesive.
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