Broken Mower

I don't mow very often because Tania enjoys mowing the yard. We have a 42" Gravely zero turn which is a big mower for the size of our yard, taking at most 40 minutes to accomplish. As such it has very low hours for its age.

When I got on it, I could feel the deck where you place your feet, moving and pushing against my feet. I stopped and shut it off so I could look to see what was wrong and noticed the entire front beam had broken loose from the frame.

I slowly drove it back to the garage and started taking it apart. Once I had the cover plate off the foot deck it was apparent the only thing holding the beam on was two 1/2" welds to the foot deck. This was allowing the beam to twist and push the foot deck.

I went online and tried to find any information I could, the biggest source I found was from Gravely's website under the reviews for the mower. There were at least six other people that had posted as having the same problem and all but one were in the same situation as I was, where the mower was past its warranty by age. The one guy that did get his frame warrantied still paid $600 for labor to have everything moved from his old mower to the new frame. Even with that I don't know that the new frame wouldn't break the same exact way.

Initially I had planned to cut the ends of the frame rails to make them straight again, clean the small amount of frame off the beam and weld it back together. This would have made the wheel base of the mower less than a 1/2" shorter and not affected anything. I chose not to do this because, the metal in that area was probably highly stressed and it would more than likely just break again. I decided instead to just weld the breaks back together and add angle iron gussets to the sides and top of each frame rail. This would allow me to get better welds in a more open area to metal that had not been stressed.

As you can see in this picture the welds were very poor and had no penetration in some areas. On the right side of this picture the weld had broken in half. This put all the load on the area that did have penetration and just broke the metal.

Even as open as some of the areas appear I had a difficult time getting my mig torch in some of the areas because the foot deck was in the way. I ended up doing a lot of overhead welding which I haven't done in a long time.

I was frustrated with some of my welds and the amount of time this was taking me. Because of that I forgot to take any pictures of it when I was done, while it was still all apart. I did take a few the following week to show the gussets.

I am extremely disappointed that this happened, the quality of the welds were terrible and shouldn't be something I would deal with for the cost of this mower. I bought the mower based on the reviews of Gravely's in general. I don't know that I will ever purchase another Gravely product. Companies like this cannot control that Brigs or Kawasaki made a lemon engine and they chose to use it in their mower. They cant necessarily control that Bosch made a bad run of relays, but they can control that they made a crap frame. The lack of penetration and the poor welds would have been visible prior to the frame being painted if anyone had actually looked.