OutdoorKing Repair Forum Forums Repairs and Maintenance Questions On Ride On Mowers Questions on Rover Ride On Mower Old Colt Major - Bolt Sizes

It's a great result. I hope you didn't do it all by hand! I have a set of these and had never really considered how great they could look polished up as mini mags.

I reckon that gearbox sprocket has had it, though. Compare it with a new one; HERE.

Yes, mostly by hand. The castings are not in any way polished, rather rough in fact, and their deep dish shape makes it tricky to get any of my basic power tools to work inside so I'm using a drill mounted sander jobbie to smooth it out before working down with wet-n-dry. Laborious but cheap. I bought a new seat for $100 off ebay, it's identical except for the bolt mountings so I decided it was easier to strip off the new seat cover and foam and attach it to a refurbished old seat base rather than try the other way.

Yes, big difference. I have 3 other gearboxes so I'll check and see what condition they are in.

Boy this business takes a long time, just as well I have the patience but I'm going to take a week off before I tackle the rear rims so my fingers can recover. The front rims and hubs are finished, this is them after a coat of Incralac. I'll let it harden in the sun for 4 days or so then bolt them up and fit the tires. The bolts are painted with a semi-gloss satin black called Dulux Epoxy Enamel. I considered shining and coating them in clear but from memory steel tends to rust even under the Incralac so black it is.

I decided to move into the 21st century and bought this to do the rear rims and a few other bitz and bobs. I had to add the wire wheel and spindal, will be great to have a wire wheel, make cleaning up bolts a pleasure.

Great setup Frank. You'll have those rims polished in no time now. The Abbott & Ashbys I'm told have been around for a long time and are a great machine

Being a sheet metal worker I'd imagine you have a pretty good setup where you are SnB. As you can see from the earlier picture I've set it up on an old Triton workbench I scrounged off the side of the road once. I have limited room in the garage and didn't want the mess it would make in there so I use it out the back. Do all the work on them out the back in fact. I Have polished one rim with it already, it was easy but didn't give the nice even finish I had achieved by the wet-n-dry method.

There is another one of these mowers for sale in the next suburb so I'm off to see it today. I can't seem to get enough of them, but at the price, $150 ono, it's worth it for the spare parts. I saw on another thread a guy broke a rear hub and had to go to all the trouble of having it re-welded. Bugger that! I had that done on a mower deck once and it was cheap, but trying to guarantee the hub would be orthogonal with the axle wouldn't be easy. I'd rather just dive into a bin of spares myself.

I mean just look at this thing, $150, why wouldn't you buy it?

Hello Frank

Yep, that would be a bargain.
There's plenty of components and engineering in them.

This one looks like a Colt Minor - with the 10series Briggs engine.

The colt of no regret.
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Jack

Well it didn't turn out that way Jack. It wasn't obvious in the picture online but there was a LOT of deep rust in the body, the steering pillar had been reattached with welds and angle iron and the cutting deck had huge holes in it. Needless to say I passed it by.

I set about yesterday to swap out the gearbox and was again hindered by the fact that my various (quality) sockets and open enders needed to be forced onto the nuts and bolts. Something has happened to them over the years it seems, they have swelled up (mild surface rust ) or perhaps they made them a tight fit from the factory? Then a POXY circlip on the input shaft held me up for an hour as well as needing to find a replacement as well as buy a pair of small circlip pliers to reattach it.

I have never worked on a vehicle as cantankerous as this one and I own three 1977 hiace vans. And this a simple older mower? I'd dread the thought of working on one more complicated. A friend who repairs ride ons from a back yard workshop, and that's all he does, warned me about them years ago. They a mongerals alright lol.

Frank as your friend knows only too well repairing rideons is a thankless task. Every one you get has been left out in the weather so everything is rusted,they have been flogged into the ground and to do a reasonable job on repairing them I can spend up to a month. Not a brilliant financial business plan but it keeps me in the shed and that keeps swmbo happy

The other thing that's very common on older Australian-made/assembled machines is the use of Whitworth [and less commonly BSF] fasteners on the chassis. These were the commonest local standards in the pre-metric days, not so much US AF-hex UNC/UNF/SAE. So you really need a few BSW/BSF spanners and sockets to work on them. Or 'universal' tools like the 'Metrinch' range.


It always seems to be just one small task that doesn't go well, and holds up the entire job!

I suspected that from the outset Gadge. I'll look around and see what's available

I can see that now. I think the biggest mistake I made was to do it bit by bit leaving the mower basically fully assembled. I think it would have been wiser to pull off the cutting deck first (is still attached) and then remove say the engine and gearbox, seat and then say the wheels. I'll pull off the deck now and proceed from there.
I'll know better next time, if there is a next time...

Just a quick update. I have mostly stripped down the spare red mower I bought and noticing that its body and parts generally are in better shape will have decided to rebuild that one instead of the green one. The work I did on the green one was basically just respraying and that needed to be done anyway if it is to go into storage. I will pinch the motor and cutting disc off it and then pop it on a shelf. Will post again when I've repainted old red and have it mostly re-assembled.

A Question about the Spindal.

Are these servicable? Should I disassemble it and oil or grease it?

Frank if you are talking about the deck spindle, if you are going to use the machine to gut grass just replace the bearings with sealed ones

Thanks Norm, will do.