Wheels on a Murray Select

3 years ago

I'm helping my mother in law out with her riding mower. Her husband passed away last June, so a lot of the handyman work is falling on me these days.

They bought a used Murray Select a few years ago. As I was doing some basic maintenance on it today, she pointed out that the rear tires are actually golf cart tires! They're pretty slick, too, and she often spins while mowing on the slight slope of her back yard.

Then she realized that her husband had new (used) wheels with tires for it, he just never got around to replacing them before the cancer took over too much. I saw that the numbers on the new tires matched the old ones perfectly, so I quickly jacked up the mower and pulled off the old wheels.

But as I tried to put the new ones on, I realized that the holes were just a smidge too small to go over the axle! I mean, maybe a millimeter too small... I could get on just a very little bit, but it wouldn't go any further.

It was 8pm and we were in a little bit of a hurry to get dinner, so she decided to leave them off and she would take them to a tire shop next week to have the new tires put on the old wheels. But in retrospect, I don't KNOW for sure whether the spinning she mentioned was from the tires, or possibly the old wheels being slightly too big and the axle spinning around inside of them! I don't know if she meant that the tires came from a golf cart... or the wheels AND tires.

So before she has them changed, I thought I would ask.

Is there something here that I'm missing? Are there spacers inside of the wheels that can be / should be removed? Should I have used a rubber mallet to tap them on? Or is it the right move to have the new tires moved over to the old wheels?

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Comments (3)

krnuttle
3 years ago

Many lawn tractors have a mild tread pattern so as not to mess up the grass. ie more golf cart like tread, than the aggressive traditional tractor treads.

On my new JD I frequently have slipping problems. The problem is the ground is wet and is too slippery to get any traction. The problem is exacerbated in situations where one wheel does not have as much weight on it and it lifts from the ground Slightly.

On my old tractor "someone" by passed the seat switch. This meant that in some these wet condition I could slid to the fender to weight down the wheel that was slipping so little damage was done.

As for the wheels: by having golf cart wheels, did your father in law get the wheels from a golf cart remove the tires and install them on the lawn tractor. If I had a set of golf cart wheels that had the same size tires as the tractor, I would remove the tires and install them on the tractor rims. It is a do it you self job, or probably not more the 50 dollars at a store. It would save you well over $100 that the new tires cost. I believe that tires for my JD are about $60 to $70 a piece
Jason, zone 7A, near Greensboro NC
Original Author
3 years ago
This is a complicated one, because I'm just going by what she said that he said a few years ago... I honestly don't know if these are REALLY golf cart tires / wheels, or if he said that jokingly and she took it seriously.

Their entire yard is on a gentle slope, though, so she has to have decent traction just to get it back up the hill! The tires on there now do more damage from spinning than heavier tread could do.

I found the mower on Murray's website so I guess it's still current, but the one they have HAS to be at least 15 years old:

https://www.murray.com/na/en_us/product-catalog/riding-lawn-mowers/42-riding-mower.html

The tires in the picture have a lot more tread than what they have. The new tires don't look like that, either, though; the new ones look more like mud tires on a truck with knobby tread. But there's no way I'm getting her to drop $150 on new tires, she's on a very fixed income, and with his income gone she's struggling as it is. So I guess I'll have the ones she has transferred over, and see what happens :-/
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krnuttle
3 years ago
That $150 would be plus labor in some cases.

As for the tires, in real live I don;t think the tires are as nobby as they appear in pictures. In a quick review of the lawn tractors at Lowes the treads on all tractors appear pretty much standard.

I did not check where you are but here east of Raleigh we have had a lot of rain. So much so that I did not mow front lawn as it has quite a slope. When the ground is wet, I frequently have so much slippage that I can on t get up the slope. When the yard dries out I have no problem.