Landmaster Ride On Project

[Joseph 332]

It's been a while since I've posted on here, so I thought I would make a new thread about a project that I've started recently and try to update it regularly, hopefully it might be of interest to a few people.

 

This machine is a bit different to most of our collection - it is a little Landmaster Super Deluxe Ride on (I believe is what they were marketed as). I bought this in April this year, having had it pointed out to us by a fellow forum member (thanks again Paul). I barely touched the tractor for a few months due to studying for exams, but since there is a couple of weeks left of the summer holidays and some of our other projects have slowed down I have finally gotten around to looking at this. Here are a couple of pictures of the tractor when we picked it up.

 

 

 

This machine was a COVID project for the previous owner, and he made a number of modifications to the tractor. The biggest change is probably the engine swap that it has had. I am under the impression that it originally had a 4hp Briggs in it, but the previous owner said that he struggled to get parts for it, so he swapped in this 5hp model of a similar series. I have used the numbers on the engine tin to date the engine to the 15th of November 1978. From what I've seen from Paul's thread of the restoration of his Landmaster, the tractor itself was made in 1966, so the engine is 12 years younger. The previous owner told me he had it running and driving 18 months before he sold it, so a bit longer now but hopefully the engine will run without many issues. Other modifications include the chute on the side of the deck, which I quickly removed, pneumatic tyres, extensive deck repairs and the handlebars appear to have been cut off, and remounted upside-down using a T-joint. It has also been repainted, with some parts having the wrong colour on it such as the front wheels which should be white, and the engine could do with a lick of paint too, which should be white. The quality of the paint isn't the best, so probably needs some work in future

 

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, when I began to look at this machine in more detail. I removed the handle bars and bonnet to gain better access to the engine, which seemed far more fiddly than it should have - this seems to be a pattern on this machine unfortunately! This wasn't helped by all imperial fixings being replaced with metric bolts of varying sizes.

 

 

With these parts off I drained the fuel, as on this engine the carb is mounted on the fuel tank such that the tank appears to act as a fuel bowl - plus I didn't fancy pulling old fuel through the fuel system when I checked for a spark.

 

 

We bought this pump years ago and have never used it for anything, beats syphoning the fuel by nearly drinking it. Glad I did drain it though, I wasn't very keen on how the old fuel looked or the sediment that was suspended in it.

 

 

With the fuel drained I was happy to pull the engine over, so I used our spark plug tester to check for a spark, and as you can see below it did indeed have a spark so that's one less possible issues

 

 

While I had the spark plug out (and it was easier to pull over) I took the opportunity to identify what all of the controls do. I don't have access to any sort of manual for the tractor, only for the engine so before this I wasn't sure how everything works. This uncovered a couple of issues, mainly that both the deck and drive belts coming off the engine pulley are not being disengaged enough when the clutch is pushed down, so I need to make some adjustments to allow the belts to slip when the deck is disengaged and the clutch pedal is pushed. The good news is that the brake appears to work, along with the forward-reverse gear change and 1st to 2nd. 

 

 

This is as far as I have got so far, next step is probably going to be lifting the front of the tractor to get access to the belt tensioners on the underside of the machine and making some adjustments. I'll post again if and when I make more notable progress. 

[pmackellow 2,738]

Glad to see you ar getting on with the little Landmaster Joseph

 

Perhaps we can meet up at an event in the near future and bring both machines together, should be interesting !

 

Paul

 

[Cub Cadet 613]

Nice job 

[Joseph 332]

6 months later now, and we have finally made some notable progress on the Landmaster. I might not fit all of our progress into this update, we shall see because there is quite a lot to cover.

 

Paul kindly lent us his Landmaster so that we could see what had been modified on ours in the past, which has proven very useful and has uncovered things that we wouldn't have spotted without a similar machine next to ours.

 

The first thing that we noticed was that our front axle was upside down. There is an arch shape in the centre of the axle on one side, which should point upwards. Previously our front axle had been scraping the grille when the axle pivoted, however with the axle flipped over it now has much more space to pivot. You can see the scrape marks in the picture below, and the amount of space gained from flipping the axle over

 

Something else we noticed was that our machine appeared to have its clutch set up wrong. It was set up such that when the clutch pedal is pushed down, an idler pulley is moved away from the drive belt, removing tension from the drive belt and allowing it to slip on the engine pulley. However, from comparing to Pauls machine, we know that the clutch should be set up as a 'push to drive' pedal, where the belt sits on the other side of the idler pulley and when the pedal is pressed down, it tensions the drive belt and drive is provided the gearbox. We have now made this change, which required a slightly longer belt, so it is now up to an A45 belt. Another modification on our machine is that it doesn't have the cast engine pulley that it would have had from the factory. That has been replaced by a pair of taper lock pulleys, which are larger than the original pulley. The deck pulley is only 1/8" larger in diameter, whereas the drive pulley is 1" larger in diameter. This is not too much of a problem, as the pulleys seem to work with the size of belts that we have now

 

We took off the rear fender to get better access to the brake band and the gearbox to make some adjustments. The gear selectors felt stiff, and it was difficult to tell when a gear had been engaged. All it took to sort this was a bit of oil in the 2 oiling points, and both selectors moved smoothly, with a clear difference between each position on the selector. The brake band just needed tightening a bit, and now functions as it should do.

Finally for this update, we tackled the handlebars, which had been cut and rewelded at a different angle by a previous owner. Having removed the handlebars, we cut around one of the welds and managed to separate the handlebars into 2 parts

 

We cleaned up the welding on the T-junction, which was pretty messy and rewelded the handlebars in the same position as Pauls Landmaster. Quite a while was spent with the angle grinder making the joins as smooth as possible, and we sprayed it with some zinc galvanising paint. Ignore the pile of Kohlers waiting to be put to use in the background 

 

We have made even further progress, but that'll have to wait for another day as my wake up time for sixth form starts with a 5. 

 

 

Joseph