We have a Kubota T1600 diesel ride on mower.
It has worked reliably for many years but has recently begun to eat drive belts. The drive belts are used to take power from a pair of pulleys on the front of the crankshaft to the mower deck. There are two belts in parallel with an idler which is pushed against the belts by a lever to engage the mower drive.
I'm pretty sure the fundamental problem is wear in the mechanism through which the lever moves the idler. The idler 'flapped' around to a significant extent. I have done a temporary fix to minimise the wobble and to keep the idler 'square' but belts are still failing.
This could be for a number of reasons:-
Using slightly imperfect and badly matched belts (at £50 per pair one does want to get the most out of them).
The idler may still not be perfectly mounted (but it must have worked OK for a long time in its 'part worn' state.
I don't know exactly how to set up the various guides that keep the belts in position.
My problem now is that I can't find any information on how to set up a belt drive like this, all the owner's manual tells you is how to tension the belts. It doesn't tell you how to replace them let alone how to set up the various guides - there's a plate at the bottom, a bolt at one side, a smooth bar at the other side and an adjuster that raises/lowers the engine slightly.
In addition doing a proper, long lasting fix the the idler mechanism is difficult because the most worn part is a pin (~ 1" diameter) which is simply welded onto the mower's chassis. Thus the only way I can see to fix it is to build up some weld on the worn parts and then carefully grind them back to being approximately round. At present I have just set it up so I can use end thrust to keep it in position but it's not a very satisfactory solution.
Any and all ideas and suggestions on how to fix this problem would be welcome, e.g.:-
Information on how to set up a belt drive like this.
Source of a proper Kubota T1600 workshop manual.
Other ways to build up the shaft part of the idler bearing.
Etc.