Last year I rebuilt my 1980 model Ariens 924050 with new gearbox, belts, paint, and most of the bearings.
The engine still pulls strong for being 30 years old, and all the wear parts are brand new but I have always been jealous of the newers Ariens blowers and their remote deflector control. I have a very long narrow driveway with limited places where I can dump the snow, so the remote deflector would be really nice. I decided to buy a remote deflector kit for a newer Ariens and find a way to make it work with my blower. I chose the 724053 kit because it was cheapest kit I could find.
First problem was getting the new style chute without the ring gear flange to work on my old machine with the ring gear flange. I cut off the flanges on my old and the new chute and welded the old geared flange to the new chute. Excuse my welding, I'm new and will be redoing the welding once I have time.
The more difficult part was getting the control lever to work. I ended up having to cut a hole in my dash and fabricate some brackets to mount the control handle too. I also had to relocate the deflector rotation control a couple inches to the left to make all the handles clear. Hindsight being 20-20 I should've put the deflector control to the right of the drive control and relocated the throttle as it would've required less work, but the way I have it setup not works fine.
Only thing left to do is paint up all the parts and redo the welding on the chute. I may end up changing the chute rotation controls to the new style with the engine mounted gear because the 10 turns of the rotation control to go from left to right slows me down quite a bit when doing my driveway. I just have to watch ebay for the parts to do it. If that doesn't happen, maybe I will wait until this engine gives up and replace it with on that has an alternator and do an electric chute control.
This message was modified Dec 26, 2010 by bdresch
