Price surprise at the dealer

jwstewar

Senior Member
Staff member
I was mowing last Saturday night with the TC24D and the MMM. All of a sudden it sounded funny. The tractor was still running but I could tell all of a sudden it wasn't under load. The belt had broken on the MMM. I knew it was in need of replacing, just hadn't made it to the dealer. Got to thinking, I hadn't replaced the belt since June of '05. I think I did pretty good.

Last time I bought a belt from the dealer it was like $65 for a 159.8" belt. When they wrote it up the price had actually gone down. It was now only $40.57. When I first bought the tractor a fuel filter was $2 or 3 and then it jumped to $9.xx. It was back down to $5. Oil Filters were still the same at $9.95. But the air filter went down from $30 something down to $24.xx. Hopefully they haven't cheapened them up, but I was glad to see the prices go down a bit. Oh, I guess they did gouge me a little bit. I bought a set of plugs for the tractor side of the loader hydraulic connections. These were $8 something each. So for 4 of the plugs, 2 oil filter, 2 fuel filters, an out air cleaner, and the belt it $136. Don't think that was too bad. Should keep me in business for awhile.
 

Doc

Admin
Staff member
Gold Site Supporter
Always nice to see prices go down. :thumb:
Good thinking getting all the maintenance stuff out of the way at once.

Do you put on the belt yourself? I have never replaced the belt on my ZTR mower deck and know it will be needing replaced sooner rather than later. I wonder how hard of a job that will be?
 

jwstewar

Senior Member
Staff member
Yes, I put the belt on myself. It isn't too big of deal. You have remove the gear box off the deck because the belt goes underneath one of its "legs" but that is 4 bolts. Since I had it off, I went ahead and changed the oil in the gear box. Same as I did when I replaced the belt the first time. After a couple minutes of "this can't be the right belt" I realized I was going around the one pulley wrong. Once I fixed that, the oil was drained out of the gear box and I buttoned everything back up. While it was off I greased everything including the tractor. All told maybe an hour. Including installing the loader to make it easier to remove the deck, remove the deck, install belt, grease everything, and then reinstall the mmm.
 
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