Another craftsman II build

Picked up 4 more mowers for free.

Two craftsman ii, one with a foote rear and one with a spicer. Both of which have junk motors.

Also picked up a bolens badged mtd with good 15hp engine and a yardman with a 22 horse.

The 22horse will be going onto the craftsman with Spicer rear. It will be getting a locked trans axle with a set of 22 inch woolybooger rear tires.  Foot throttle and some other mods

The bolens and craftsman with foote axle  will be used for parts.

nice. vtwin should be cool. are you going direct throttle, or governor?

I will be running direct throttle.

ok cool. I like to have complete control of my engines, so I can give them the abuse they deserve! my opposed twins have no problem with it, though all my singles have died because of my lead foot, most especially briggs ohv. I have yet to acquire a v twin, hopefully they are better than the ohv singles.

No, no straight pipes. I like to hear what's going on around me. Haven't got that far into the thinking as far as what I plan for exhuast. But I want a muffler

Tonight I pulled the 15 horse off the craftsman and the trans axle.


Ran into a couple issues
Broken bolt in the housing.


Also one axle just fell out, and the other axle the wheel is seized onto.

Today i pulled the trans axle apart and replaced the axle shafts with a single solid shaft, i forgot to take.pictures of the process becuase i had a pretty tough time, between bolts breaking off and/or being rounded out, among a ton of other things. But basically did a one piece axle conversion and a doc sprocket weld less locker.

https://youtu.be/XJurTvFQqsc

I decided to use a set of newer wheels that do not run keyways, instead the ha E 2 flat spots in the wheel to match the shaft and are bolted on instead of held via sir clip like the craftsman Ii is.

So I ground flat spots and drilled and tapped both ends of new axle.


Instead of dismounting my 22-11-8 woolybooger s on 4 lug aluminum wheels i decided to cut the wheel center out of the mower wheels and use it as a hub.
Youll have to excuse my ugly torch cuts. Has been probably 5 years since I've used a hand held torch, so my first cut was a bit rough. The second/hub wheel looks a ton better









As it turns out the 2 holes in the wheel line up with 2 of the 4 atv bolt holes so I bolted it on and drilled 2 new holes.



Test fitting both hubs.


Next step is to clean up the torch cuts and paint them. Then I'll be installing some collars with bearing out near the wheel to help support the trans axle and hopefully keep it togather.

We've snapped the end off the mtd/flat drive axles.  But that was after a lot of abuse.  22 tires may be too much for the 3/4 axles.

My tractor is straight piped, same engine, and you've been around it.  It's not too loud puttering around, but pretty loud of you get on it.

I almost welded the "hub" on to prevent snapping breaking the end of the axle but then changing the bearing collar I'm putting on would be a pita.

I might drill a 1/4 hole through the axle and hub and volt through it on the inside too

Pillow blocks supported to the frame would help too I think. Take the load of chassis and bumps off the aluminum case.

That's the plan they are on order

Moving a little slow because of chrostmas but I was able to get the front tires on the wheels today

Finally got my 11 year old out in the garage to help with this build. It's her mower so I told her she needs to learn to wrench on it.. Here is her first design and fab. We added pillow caskets to the axle shaft to try to help extend the life of it with a 22hp and 22 inch tires hooked to it. I helped her measure and make the cuts/drill but for the most part it is all hers. I realize there could much better fab work, but this is how kids learn.





Swapped the adjustable seat from the yardman on, aswell as the 22hp vtwin, still need to button up the wiring.


Also got the 4.80x8 Ag tires up front and the 22s on the rear.

Still alot of little things to do before it's test run the 16th, and I also plan to totally redo the steering at some point.

Looks good! Sound slike your 11 y/o got jelous of your sweet sears,lol. Plan on welding a brace from pillow bearing to frame? seen people use angle iron at 45-60 degree angle.

I thought about it but There's only 2 inches from frame to the tire so not alot of room to do it. I am going to revamp the front mounts to make sure they don't pull the bolts which I think is more likely to happen which will twist the housing, I got think the rear mounts will be an issue.

But we will see

ive seen those mounts bend, causing the bolt to woller out the hole and pop out. What id do is if theres another front drop bracket on the other side, tie them together with angle iron or flat stock. then the mounts wont really spread out, and the bolts have to shear before the brackets bend.

Looking good buddy

New steering box

How hard was it to swap 2nd gen steering into a 1st gen frame I want to so that to my Craftsman II as well

Took 2 idler pulleys to re route belt, custom built drag link, and some newly drilled holes.

I am terrible about not taking enough pics

Not too bad, now to find a setup

Timrsnakess wrote:

Not too bad, now to find a setup

I have one ill sell yea i got laying around. PM me

Been awhile since ive worked on this.

Spent the weekend on it this weekend.

I thought I had the belt system worked out and just needed to build the clutch system but it wasn't that simple.

I spent all day Saturday designing a clutch had it togather and thought it woukd work. But during random conversation with creepycrawler he mentioned as long as it was on the tension side it should work...

Well it wasn't on the tension side. I never even thought about it, I was just trying to make sure the belt cleared everything. Thankfully tom has read red lines build thread where the same thing happened so I had to redo it all today.

Creepycrawler came up to assist, after a good whileof trying differant things we found the best thing to do cut the pitman arm of the new gear box and space it down, becuase it was hitting my engine pulley and it allowed us to run the belt with no idlers. Then built a double pulley clutch setup out of various pieces of the 3 parts mowers. Have to go get proper belt still and get transaxle togather and installed, but I think it should work.





https://vimeo.com/153714423

Also had my daughter work on a gas pedal. I helped cut and weld but just like with the axle mounting I let her do the design ing.

She took the throttle cable from the yardman and we mounted in a piece of angle. It's a pretty basic design but it works. I told her she needed a big rest for her foot so it didn't slip off so we took the pedal from the variable speed control of the yardman and mounted it to the frame so it is what's pushing her lever down. Then we added a nice tight spring to the throttle at the engine pull it back