An old friend came by last week looking to replace a few parts on his old Sears Custom 10 Sierra lawn tractor. The tractor was manufactured back in the 1970’s and parts are impossible to find these days, including the mower blades. He purchased a set of blades that were the same length as the original blades, but was unable to find a set with the correct center hole. His blades used a “dog drive” hub to connect the blade to the output shaft of the mower deck gear boxes.

One face of the dog drive has a male drive key (front-right) and the other face has a female socket drive (front-left). The old, worn out sample piece can be seen between the two new pieces. The original blade can be seen behind the new blade.

I used a drop from 2.50″ diameter 4140 bar stock to make the dog drives. I turned and faced the material and then drilled a 10 MM diameter pilot hole through the center and then mounted it to a fixture plate. I machined the slot using on my Bridgeport Series One CNC mill and a 0.375″ diameter carbide end mill .

Owen Machine is located just outside of Wellsville, Ohio and has been serving local businesses for almost 25 years. Our shop  provides a wide range of machined parts for our customers in the tri-state area. We specialize in maintenance machining and can work from customer supplied sketches and drawings or we can produce new parts using your old, worn out and damaged parts as a sample.

We will do whatever it takes to get new replacement parts made or damaged parts repaired so that downtime is kept to a minimum. Keeping our customers in business is a big part of our business. Once we understand our customers needs, we can then plan ahead for future breakdowns by stocking the most commonly needed materials so that they are on hand when an emergency arises. In many cases we are able to help get the customer’s equipment back up and running the very same day.

Our machinery list includes three vertical milling machines, two engine lathes, a turret lathe, a Bridgeport CNC vertical mill, a CNC chucker lathe, three drill presses, and numerous other specialized tools and fixtures that enables us to quickly and accurately machine products to our customers specifications. Complex shapes are drawn using the popular BobCAD drafting and machining software and the computer codes are then generated and uploaded to the CNC equipment.