DIY: How to Change the Main Deck Belt on MTD Gold Lawn Mower - Bolens or Yard Machines

Welcome back to Tightwad Repairs. Before starting any project, make sure that you have all the appropriate safety materials needed. Consult your owner's manual, which can usually be found online with a simple Google search, and read through the safety precautions and the directions the manufacturer might have provided for the service you plan to complete. For today, we're going to be working on this MTD Gold 7-speed lawn tractor. You need to replace the main drive belt that drives the blades. It goes from the motor, from this pulley, down to the pulleys that are under these pulley guards. And it makes the blades spin. The first thing that you want to do is disconnect or remove your batteries. This makes it easier to access some of the other belts later. You want to take your key out. I've already removed the key from the ignition. And I find it best to jack up the front end. I'll slide those jack stands under there for safety and chop the back wheels with a board. If you don't have wheel chops, you can use those. And we've engaged the parking brake. So the parking brake lever pushed all the way in, engaged on the variable speed switch so the motor will not roll. And after you've got all that done, you're ready to get started. The first step in removing our belt is to remove this belt guard. This protects debris and stuff from getting in there. Grass does build up in there. It's good to vacuum it out, blow it out, spray it out with water after you're done cutting. But you can see we have two bolts on the left, one bolt on the right. I've already loosened them to make them a little easier to take out. And you can just remove those three bolts. I'll set them up here on the top so I can keep it all together. That just slides right off, nothing special about it. And that exposes the belt. You can see my belt's loose, so that's why I'm changing it. Whenever I disengage my PTO, my blades continue to spin. And they slowly spin down, where if your belt's a little bit tighter, it acts as a brake to stop the blades as soon as the PTO is disengaged. You want your blades to stop so that when you put your mower in reverse and back up, your slow-spinning blades don't grab the grass and pull up chunks of grass. It just makes your lawn look bad. So we'll go around to the other side now, to the non-chute side. And you'll see we have the same type of guard. We can remove the bolts on this side. There's two on the left, one on the right. These are 11mm bolts, so get off your socket and ratchet and remove it. Again, I'll put these up here to keep them safe, and it just lifts off again. And here's the other side. So there's your main drive pulley, your tension pulleys in the center with the little bit shinier coat, and then your belt pulleys—I mean your blade pulleys here. The next step is to loosen the bolts on the tension pulleys. They're called tension pulleys because they move back and forth. They are spring-loaded, and these actually just act as guides. You'll see the back side of the belt, so the wide part of the belt, is what goes against the tension pulleys. But they have a nut on the top, bolt comes in from the bottom, and you have to loosen those up in order to get the belt off. Make sure you don't take the bolt all the way out, because it's hard to get thread back through there. But you can see this tab right here keeps the belt in the pulley, so there's no way to get the belt out of the pulley without loosening this up. I've already loosened them, and I'll show you how I do it. I take the closed end of my crescent wrench and put it on the bolt under the bottom, and then I take my ratchet and use it to loosen the top nut. So I do this on both sides. It's a little bit different process for the opposite side, and I'll show you that. Now we're on the non-shoot side. So if you're sitting on the mower, it would be the left side, and we're going to loosen the nut on this tension pulley. But as you can see, it's blocked by metal on this side, and there's a lot of stuff on this side blocking it as well, so you can't really get that closed end of the wrench on there too easily. So what MTD did was put a hole from the bottom under the deck where you can fit a long socket up in there, and we'll take our long socket. These are 14mm, so I take my 14mm socket from the bottom side and stick it up on the bolt, and then I take my 14mm from the top side, stick it on the nut, and loosen it up and get my pulley good and loose. Again, make sure you don't take it all the way off because then you'll have to figure out how to feed that bolt up from the bottom. You can see I left a little bit. It's not really that far down in there. I didn't loosen it too much because I can get it off of this guide with the looseness that I've got it at right now. All right, so the last step before we can remove the belt is to remove this belt guide that's on the main drive pulley right here. You can see up under it that it's just a bar that goes through the side of the tractor. There's no cotter pin. There's no nut or anything. It's just held in by tension. You can just simply push it in and move it to the side. You could totally remove it, but I don't think there's any need to do so because once you move it to the side, you can easily just loosen your belt and it comes right off. It's a good idea to take pictures of everything before you remove the belt so you know the direction that the belt goes around each pulley. It's very important that you put the belt on the correct way. Your belt is a V-shape, so it's thinner on the inside than it is on the out. The V-shape, the thinner side, goes always in on your main pulleys. And then on your other pulleys, it goes with the biggest, the widest side goes inside on tension pulleys. I was able to find the replacement belt made by MTD at the local hardware store. There's the part numbers. I recommend that you always use the manufacturer's belts if you can. They're going to be an exact match instead of a replica that just works with your mower. So always try to get the manufacturer's. All right, so I always try to start with the front pulley first. Since your guide's out of the way, it should go in there pretty easily. I'm going to go ahead and pop this back in place. There's several holes, but mine was on the middle hole. And then remember you go the wide end of the belt goes into the first pulleys and behind the guard, and it goes around the other two pulleys. So I have to go to the other side to fix the other one. There's a little silver hook in here, right here, where you have to make sure the belt is looped inside it. And we should be good to go. So you can see it's now around the main pulley, on the backside of that pulley, wrapping around this one. There's the silver hook that goes inside. And then you can see the other pulley back there. So now all we've got to do is tighten up our two pulleys that we loosened here. The pulleys are now tight. And the next part is to put back on your belt guards. So if you remember we had three bolts, one in each hole, and then repeat the process on the other side. If you found this video helpful, like and subscribe to my channel. I'll be posting other videos related to this same lawn tractor on my channel as possible. Be sure to leave a comment below if you have any questions about this project or other projects that you would like for me to complete.