98 craftsman lt1000 Mudder/trail rider

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...............

i ACTUALLY feel bad for you.......
hopefully you figure out what happened

Don't worry bud... You ain't the only one with a failing MST. Sucks.

I’m guessing something got in there and got stuck between the bull gear and the case then made its way to freedom by breaking through it

Well I tore it apart today and found out that the bolt head that held my extra spider gears in place came loose and jammed up between the case and the bull gear. I didn’t look very much yet to find where the metal shavings came from but I’m wondering if I should retry this method or if I should attempt a limited slip differential using this big spring I have laying around that just so happens to fit perfectly. Can anyone gimme advice on wether or not to do the limited slip

you said this will be a drift mower right?

Eh prolly not now I’m guessing it’s just gonna be a trail machine

alrigh.............wich one?
but besides that, if its a trail machine, some of the people on here run limited slip, but the people who run limited slip usually have STUPID good tires, but for YOU,
id recomend a locked diff, un less you can find some really aggresive tires

I don't think any of us run a limited slip differential because the transaxles we run don't have that feature.

I like your idea with the spring though! Maybe add a washer on each end too? I think I would give it a try and see how it performs, not like it'll really hurt anything.

i don’t think I’m able to run a washer since it would hang over the edge of the bull gear and catch on the case so it’ll just be pushing directly on the gears

If you found one with the same O.D. as the spring it would probably work, but I imagine running without washers would still be fine.

@AllisKidD21, i meant to say one person runs limited, wich is craftsmanquead i believe, i remeber him telling me he did....

Ahh okay I’ll look into that

If i were you I'd take a welder and turn all of those spider gears into one solid block. That's just me though.

I don’t have a welder in easy access but I was thinking if I could do that and also weld the original two to the shaft so it’d be locked in multiple ways and hopefully unbreakable but I’m still thinking imma try the limited slip first

So I got the posi setup then found out it wasn’t gonna work since the end of the halfshafts hit on the spring. Since this won’t work I’m gonna end up having my dad weld the 4 spider gears together and also weld the original spiders to the pin so hopefully it’ll be indestructible. Also there’s a gouge in the side of the case from when it blew, will this present a problem even though nothing is against it? Or will I be good just jb welding the hole

Grind out any sharp corners of the hole to prevent cracks from forming and clean it really well before you jb weld it. It will probably be ok for a while.

Make sure he tacks it all around before turning the thing really solid. Tack it, spin it to make sure it's true, tack it, spin it, tack it, etc. Do that until you feel it won't warp when you weld it fully. If the axle shafts are out of alignment they will blow the case up.

Is it possible to shorten this shaft or to replace it with a shorter one so that it won’t be in the way of the belt

Yes. If it was flush with the case, would that work?

Yes thats how the spicer was

Well, I did have one, but I just used it on my BO project. You might be able to find a short MST shifter on Ebay.

I cut the one on my 820 down. Just cut it, grind the square profile on the end with an angle grinder, then drill and tap a ¼-28 hole on the end for the original bolt. Only problem i had with it is because i ground the square a bit too small and had to weld it back up and grind it again to get the slop out.

So I jb welded the case up and got smoother out surprisingly well, I left the extra jb on the outside of the case so that hopefully it will provide some support so this won’t happen for a while

Looks good. We'll see how it lasts i guess.

jb weld.......grade A engineering..........

so this wasn’t the update I was planning to make but I think I blew the trans AGAIN. So a couple of days ago I finally got it home after welding the diff and a few other things and had it to the point where it was working almost perfectly so I decided to take it out into the field to do a little bit of mud riding with it. I plowed into a mud hole and got stuck so I was backing up but in the middle of backing up it stopped moving and I looked and the belt was still on the proper way but was just spinning on the pulley in all gears including neutral but it was still rolling in neutral so I had to push it a bit. Anyways it’s back home now and I guess imma look at it some more sometime this week hopefully.
Ended up getting the j hook and dragging it home with this beast that I recently got, a build thread on it is coming once I get the green craftsman going the way it should

Any obvious things on the outside? It could just be the pulley spinning on the shaft. Check simple stuff like that before you tear into it.