It is a Simplicity Landlord 2010. My wager is circa 1965ish. Unlike common modern lawn tractors, this has a horizontal shaft engine. This particular unit has a full thru-shaft type crankshaft giving the engine 2 PTOs.

In my case the front PTO is used for the snowblower. The rear PTO goes to a device called the “bevel gear box” which is the achilles heel for these model tractors. Mine is in mediocre shape, not amazing, but not ready to explode either.

I had some problems with it running 100% initially, those were ironed out by replacing the points with this magical device I bought from amazon.

Future plans – see how it deals with heavy snowfall this winter. I didn’t really have everything in tune for last years snowfall before it was all gone, but I have high hopes. In time I will rebuild the bevel gear box and also open, reseal and close the leaky transmission. A good coat of paint is in order at some time but I’m not sure when that will happen.

I’ll post videos sometime this coming winter of it doing its thing.

I should have gotten good before pictures, I didn’t. Oops. I suppose I should mention that the goal wasn’t necessarily to build a retaining wall flowerbed box thingie, but rather I wanted to get the retaining wall blocks that were delivered to me some months ago off pallets, out of the driveway and into their proposed useful resting spot. I was less than 1/2 successful in this endeavor as I still have a pallet and change of bricks left.

You can see the intention is for the wall to go all the way around the Flowerbed. It’s not good practice to do landscaping above the sill plate. Also I need to maintain a path for the rain-gutter to get away from the house.

Lots of tamping. I didn’t start with gloves on… Plenty of blisters.

Well here is what I think the finished product will be.

I’m going to try and level the tops a bit, definitely in that corner where the cinder and wall blocks meet.

After getting the wall built I spent another hour or so sifting landscaping rock out of the dirt contained within. It seems the prior homeowners redid this Flowerbed a number of times. I found quite a number of layers of fabric and extra rock. I could sieve rock out of this ground forever it seems.

I don’t have a great way to haul fill dirt, nor do I have a great source yet. I’ll work on both of those problems during the upcoming week.

And lastly, I have a picture of the bricks being delivered. The forking truck was a surprise. When the guy pulled up I was like “WTF, I didn’t pay too have these delivered so I could unload them by hand.” The Eastern European delivery driver was a nice guy. Go Menards.