Slowly making progress. Put new bearings and seals in the deck spindles. I bought them from Oreileys auto for about $115 which included an extra seal in case I screwed one up or had to open back up a spindle unit. Seals and bearings are National. One thing I did also was to put the spacers that actually run in the seals on the lathe and polish them--they were so rough the seals wouldn't have stood a chance. Pitting was so bad I replaced a couple with others from the "parts dept". Had to put new nuts on the top (pulley side) of the spindles. Also had to replace all the pulleys, the others had deep pitted rust. Surface rust would have been OK with polishing. It didn't matter what I would have done to these pulleys, they were so rough they would have eaten a new belt within an hour. Put on a new idler as well. The idler arm and shoulder bolt were fairly recent replacements. Put on a new Kevlar belt. The rear gauge wheels are in decent shape. Got to make a new shaft for the front roller and then replace the bushings in the front gauge wheels. Still have to clean, straighten and then pop-rivet the serial tag back on.
We can't figure out what this deck was exposed to, but it caused some strange rust/corrosion. The large reinforcing plate was corroded horribly on both sides as well as the area it rests on the deck. The rest of the deck was decent with a lot of paint. When I say corroded, I mean I had to use a hand grinder to start removing rust with a hard stone, then move up to a flap disc, then to a wire brush before treating with RustMort. Where the deck hangers bolt was so rusted around the footprint that the deck warped. I made a reinforcement plate (3/8 x 2 1/2 or 3 x long enough to span both hangers) that went on the underside of the deck. The deck is sandwiched in between the hangers and the reinforcement plate. Added a couple extra holes to bolt the plate in between the hangers. 2 of the bearing housings looked pretty good, just nasty. One was corroded severely on the outside, makes no sense. The inside of all 3 were good except water had gotten in one and rusted the bearings. One housing was missing the top seal, 2 of the bottom seals were gutted, no shields/cups on the top side and one on the bottom side had deteriorated to the point it only qualified as a washer. Would you believe all the blade nuts screwed off without an air wrench?
Mower has what I guess are Gator blades. I had a lot of trouble sharpening them. I doubt they had ever been touched up, yet they were heavily pitted and very hard to grind. Never did get them "razor sharp" but they should do fine.