My Troy Bilt lawn tractor won’t steer. Looking underneath I can see that the gear at the end of the rod is not engaged with the larger gear required for steering. There is a little play in the rod–I can push it so that it does engage, but when I let go it no longer does. Any idea what is broken and how to fix it?
Ummm…
Pics? Diagram? Model number?
Those machines have any number of designs (real steering gears are expensive) to kinda-sorta steer.
Without some idea of what these 2 gears look like/how they are supposed to work, we aren’t going to get real far.
I used to work for a company which made steering gears for (mainly) heavy trucks. In the 70’s there was a legend of someone coming in and asking engineeering to come up with a steering system for a garden tractor - one which could be produced for a whopping $9.00 Most of our designs started with a cast steel casing. $9.00 would not cover making the sand mold, let alone the steel…
The junior engineer who was given this fool’s task actually came up with something which could steer a garden tractor AND be produced for $9.00 - the would-be customer was not amused by the rope-and-pulley system he proposed.
I would not be surprised if a garden tractor’s steering died after a single season.
This sounds very similar to what happened with a ‘lawn tractor’ / riding mower owned by an ‘in-law’ and I used to mow her fields/lawn with. Not a fancy/expensive mower, but more of the lower-end near-generic designs (42" deck maybe w/ a few levers and the small e-brake lever between feet, etc) The mower’s front wheel had been previously run-into a little stump or otherwise-immobile object and gave the whole ‘system’ a whammo, so to speak. It was the strongly-suspected cause as to why the steering was not working well. The ‘plate’ that had the steering-of-wheels ‘gear’ upon it had loosened beyond what the mounting-bolts could tighten down and hold-in-place…not able to be close enough to keep the steering-wheel’s column/gear on the end firmly placed and not ‘slip’ as you turned the wheel. The two ‘gears’ would just rub each other and not turn the wheels.
Pretty much, to fix it would involve taking whole thing in to have the ‘plate’ welded into place and/or make new mounting holes or whatever to reattach the mechanism so it is within tolerance for the gears to mesh properly and actually push things like they are designed for.
What the in-law did to avoid the ‘proper’ repair’ was to get a wedge of wood (like a doorstop of shape and size, fwiw) and kinda hammer it in between the plate and engine block(? - iirc as block was a mounting point for things already) to force the thing against the wheels’ crossbar gear part. If I had the mower in front of me I could give better terms and names, but I hope you get the gist. The situation may be vastly different, and I am not one to advocate hammering wedges into ‘systems’ as a long-term solution, etc. The repair worked for two mowings (a few hours each time), but mower finally repaired ‘properly’ and working fine now.
I would be looking at the places where the ‘mounts/bolts’ for the portions of steering stuff that holds the two ‘gears’ together (and not allow them to move away from each other, per se). Especially if the front-wheel ‘system’ took a jolt of some sort that torqued ~violently beyond intended use/application of mower; lower-end or ‘generic’ mowers are built for ~no bumps at all, imho with the weak supports/quality for steering stuff.