Make your own flywheel puller
When I first discovered that I'd
ordered the wrong flywheel puller I had a brief fantasy of
fabricating one of my own to get the job done.
I never could figure out a decent direction to go in and decided to
give up on it for a while and just mow with the semi un-balanced blade.
Well some guy with an interesting blog named Ed had a bit more gumption
than I did and almost made his own
diy flywheel puller tool pictured here.
He reports the wood
breaking before the flywheel came free, which is a bummer. The way he
finally solved the problem was to take it to a local shop where they
used the crude but effective hammer and screwdriver approach to pop it
off.
I'm starting to wonder if
anybody out there uses these flywheel puller tools for the basic small
to medium lawn mower engine?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I know that way back when I did small engine repair that I should have used a fly wheel puller but not having one I used a 3 jaw puller instead. Even with pressure on the puller I still had to smack the center bolt with a hammer to pop the fly wheel loose from the crankshaft. I've seen many small engine repair shops put wedges under the edge and again smack the side of the flywheel with a hammer to pop it off the crank. The jury is out. These little engines will take a lot off abuse and as long as you don't crack any of the parts (flywheel or crank case) you should be fine. The main idea is to use three points of contact as just two points will actually bind the flywheel even tighter to the shaft. What ever you do, never hit the crankshaft directly as this will ruin the threads, so you can't get the parts back together, unless you have a die or thread chaser to dress the threads. This is where a brass punch comes in handy. Really it's easier to do than it is to read or write about. I used to read a lot of engineering mags and a character in them could fix ANYTHING! His name was Marmaduke Surfaceblow. Marmaduke used Occam's Razor to fix everything. Maybe the spirit of Marmaduke is looking over your shoulder, giving you the backing you need to do the job well!