Pto clutch issues 101. Most common issues I see. Plus removal tips and tricks.

what's up guys hope you're doing well today and in this video I'm going to show you how to diagnose your PTO clutch issue uh the the most common issues that I see and it's basically going to be kind of a 101 we're going to cover everything um pretty much every situation that I see all right and it comes down to two different things two different categories it's either physical damage to the clutch or an electronic issue all right and I don't want you to guys to be like some of the customers I see all the time come in their blades aren't engaging or something's going wrong and they change the PTO switch so they go by uh 80 PTO switch and waste the time changing it out when they didn't never needed to do that I'm gonna let you in on a little secret it's rarely the PTO switch all right now this doesn't just apply to John Deere's it applies to the skag Toro everything they use a lot of the same parts and so uh this is going to be kind of just a general thing but mostly everything I'm going to show you is going to be on John Deere's on commercial mowers I'm going to show you some standards some uh like a 636m and some Zero Turns now um when someone comes in and they say hey I'm having something wrong with my blades engaging this is what I'll see written on the work order blade's not engaging that's all I see okay so I gotta determine okay is this an electrical issue or is a physical issue physical damage issue most of the time it's a physical damage issue so first off make sure the belt's on there correctly and then I'll go in underneath there and look and you might see um this is kind of rare but I'm gonna go ahead and throw it out there uh broken crankshaft bolt uh holding the clutch on now this can be good news and bad news all the same time good news being you may not have to buy a new clutch bad news is you're about to have to pay or do it yourself or extract a broken bolt from the crankshaft which can be very time consuming and painstaking work that's kind of the third most rare out of the physical damage issue um and the physical damage is probably the most common versus electronic so we'll get to the electronic here in just a moment the most common is a broken clutch stop bracket or clutch stop you know anti-rotation bolt I've done a couple videos on this in the past basically what that is is when you engage the PTO clutch uh there's a bracket or a bolt or something that stops the clutch from just spinning around on the crankshaft now once that fails it normally will damage not only the clutch but it definitely will damage the wiring harness um and the other common issue is a um are the bearings of the clutch now when the bearings go bad in the clutch it creates some heat it creates noise you're going to also hear noise with that clutch stop bracket broken when you start up the mower you're going to hear like a grounding squealing all this mess going on uh it's not going to be good chances are in those situations you're going to have to replace the clutch and if it's a clutch stop bracket or other situations on the John Deere zero turn 90 900 Zero Turns um you're probably going to either have to get like a reinforcement welded in or the uh replacement bracket like I've done videos on in the past now if it should if it and if it's the bearings you're going to have to replace the clutch and real quick let's go over again these clutches I don't know about the other brands but I know for the John Deere uh Warner makes these clutches you can buy these directly from PTO direct and save a couple hundred dollars all right um versus buying a uh the exact same clutch from John Deere with the John Deere part number in a John Deere box all right so um I'm also going to show you guys some removal tips because sometimes these clutches can be really hard to remove especially if it's had burned up bearings and it's gotten hot and um cause that crankshaft to kind of swell a little bit I'm going to show you that here in just a moment actually let's go ahead and show you that now foreign so first I'm going to lubricate everything with some WD-40 WD-40 is not going to hurt anything on your clutch this I'm going to remove this belt guide this is on a z900 series and first I want to show you guys the method that works most often is I loosen and tighten the bolt like in this case I'm going to loosen the bolt all the way out I'm going to pull the bolt all the way out and I'm going to lubricate it I'm going to lubricate that bushing and you can see how the bear the clutch has stayed on the crankshaft and I'm going to spray some w40 up through there spray it on the bolt you see it's steaming hot there and you want to keep that bolt as cool as possible I'm going to put that bushing back in there with some WD-40 and now I'm going to do the tightening and loosening which helps I would say 70 of the time this works I can tighten and loosen and in this particular case it wasn't really working the bottom part was coming off fine but the top part was staying on pretty tight now you'll notice that hole in the frame up to the top right of your of the screen that's where the oil filter comes through so I'm going to take you know you can try to tap it right here but I'm going to take a bolt here and go through that hole in the frame I'm going to take a bolt and sometimes you can use like a stud or something like a piece of Rod and I'm just going to tap it Loose just gentle Taps and notice I have the bolt still in the crankshaft that way the clutch doesn't just fall on the ground and normally this will work pretty good if the tightening and loosing method doesn't work you see how I went through that hole there okay and I can remove it and it'll remove the clutch pretty easily from the crankshaft loosen it on up pull it on down and we're free now's a good time to check the bearings fill the bearings and I would recommend putting some anti-seize on that crankshaft right here I can I can easily undo the wiring harness check continuity of the wiring harness now we can do a bench test if needed on that clutch this is either a 661 or 652 you have to remove that bracket that holds that scalping wheel I'm going to lubricate it with some WD-40 spray on there and the tightening and loosing method works great on on this situation but notice I didn't realize that I had the deck belt still tight but the clutch loosened up pretty good just a series of tightening and loosening tightening and loosening and a lot of times that will work that clutch loose and then I realize as I'm pulling it down that I still have tension on the deck belt so I loosen that deck belt and then I'm able to pull the clutch right off loosen up the belt there and I can pull the clutch right off foreign sometimes these models have a washer between that drive pulley and the clutch so make sure you are aware of that checking the bearings see if they feel rough or if they feel smooth now this is a 636 M I took the wiring harness loose and you want to cut that little zip tie right there on that clutch stop bracket and you can see these bearings right now uh were given problems you can see those exposed bearings are worn out and on this particular model the customer changed the PTO switch and when I went to Crank It Up the blades were instantly engaging because the clutch was just seized up so uh Texas 16 millimeter bolt and I'm gonna go I'm going to go ahead and lubricate it everything up with my WD-40 I've already tried the tightening and loosening method on this it's not working right and so what I'm going to do is go through that left hand frame hole right there below the air filter and I'm going to put a 5 8 inch solid rod to kind of just gently tap on the top of that uh clutch to work it on down I'm going to show you that here in just a second got the wiring harness loose there's the hole I'm going to go through and I'm going to tap on the top of that clutch I'm gonna go ahead and take the bolt all the way out I'm going to find just the right rod and here you can see paying no attention to that bolt that I have welded to the rod but that Rod is 5 8 or three quarter inch I can't remember I just tapped on it with that hammer and that works out pretty well just take the time to find the right tool that you need issues out of the way I've shown you how to remove the clutch some situations now occasionally if those if the tightening loosing method doesn't work and the um using a punch and a hammer method doesn't work there are times very rare I have to basically cut that clutch off and I don't use a blowtorch what I use is a grinder with a slicer wheel and to very strategically cut it off the crankshaft I don't want to overheat or damage that crankshaft so um now let's get on to if it's an electrical issue with your clutch going on most of the time what's going to happen is it might just be your your charging system not working on your mower so let's say for example your your blades uh you're you're cutting just fine and then your blades stop cutting at the end of the day or halfway through the day or whatever I always tell people check the battery check the charging system because if the charging system's not working properly the clutch is going to be the first thing that quits working it's drawing the most amount of amps and Bolts from the battery and once it gets weak it's going to just shut that off it's not going to have enough power to power that clutch anymore it may have enough power to keep running the mower through the coils and all that but it's not going to have enough juice to keep that PTO clutch engaged since the battery's not being recharged so check that first and then the other most common issue when it's an electrical issue and when it's an electrical issue you're not really going to have much noise you know you're not going to have um you know you're not going to hear anything so usually it might be the wiring harness so you want to check continuity on that wiring harness you can take your multimeter take this wiring harness off right here take it off there and check to make sure you have good continuity and you can also bench test sometimes just the uh clutch itself has quit working so I'll show you some clips a clip right now how you can bench test this so I've got the red hooked up to Positive Black to negative and I'm going to activate the battery I'm going to tap it and it's activating just fine so in this situation I'm going to turn the uh on fine engage the blades and on this particular model you got to make sure the e-brake is off for the blades to engage properly now notice it's throwing a code here it's like three and five so it's code throwing code three and five which is PTO output over current and you'll notice I saw this on the clutch harnesses bulge and uh let me show you real quick I've already put the new clutch on this this was a warranty situation put a new clutch on it uh with the anti-rotation upgrade bracket got the wiring harness all through there new bushing cap on the clutch top bracket Bolt everything's looking pretty good so now we need to remove this control panel you need a 10 millimeter remove there a 10 25 Torx to remove these bolts here and then you'll have access to the ignition switch the relay and the control module now if you can't find the control module part number on deer.com a lot of times it'll be written right there on the part number itself once we got that replaced got the control module replaced everything was working great now got a new clutch wiring harness and control module everything's working great so let's do a quick recap all right so uh usually it might it's going to be physical damage it's either going to be your clutch stop as spun out and allowed it to damage the wiring harness possibly the clutch could be your crankshaft bolt um unfortunately that's going to be a tedious job to do I'd recommend letting a professional drill that out and do that for you if you don't feel comfortable doing that or what's most common as far as physical damage are the bearings you can't do anything about that they're eventually going to wear out and you can't grease them or anything it just it is what it is now if it's an electronic issue if your blades are shutting off at the end of the day or periodically if you're having to recharge your battery check your charging system check out that other video I did on how to check your battery and your charging system all right and that can be a quick easy fix it's both most likely going to be a voltage regulator which is about a hundred dollar part takes two screws and you're back in business all right um other than that it's usually like the wiring harness if it's not that it's the clutch itself could just have quit working um due to old age or just worn out and then uh your ignition switch or your control module could also be the issue so anyway hope that's pretty much all the situations um it's pretty simple but they can get kind of expensive unfortunately but hopefully this video will help you save some time and help you save some money and what I want you to do to help me I I want you to subscribe to the channel and click that like button but most importantly subscribe when I have more videos like this coming soon and I hope you'll stick around and watch the future videos check out some of my past videos and I'll see you guys next time thanks

Channel: Mechanical Mind

Views: 6,642

Keywords: mower clutch not working, mower blades not working, mower blades not engaging, mower blades cutting off while cutting, mower pto clutch, mower pto clutch removal, how to remove a mowers pto clutch, john deere ztrack clutch removal, john deere ztrack clutch replacement, john deere ztrack blades not working, z915 clutch, z920 clutch, z930 clutch, z950 clutch, z960 clutch, john deere z930 clutch, john deere z920 clutch, john deere z915 clutch

Id: 92O3-Vzj4fo

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022