The best and most effective way to remove that pulley is to use heat, and lots of it. The problem is that you can't heat it up too slowly or the motor shaft itself will get too hot and cook the lower oil seal. If you have an acetylene torch great but a MAPP gas torch from Home Depot gets the job done also. You will need a pulley puller set to do this without frustration. Put the bolt that holds the blade to the blade adapter back into the hole and thread it in almost all the way. Use this bolt head for your pulley puller to push on when extracting the blade adapter. Readjusting the blade bolt is necessary as you begin to pull the adapter off as it bottoms out on the adapter. Keep it in as far as you can though, so the bolt won't bend. As for the pulley, you need to emory cloth or sand the shaft as smooth as you can. Take the Allen set screws all the way out. Try the pulley puller on it now, you might have success. If not, heat the pulley up as hot as you can as fast as you can. (it will turn blueish when you are getting hot enough) Strike the pulley with a hammer without damaging the shaft several times at different angles. As it cools, spray WD40 into the set screw holes and on the shaft. It will smoke profusely. (Do several times before it cools off) The object of this is to have the 2 different steel objects cool at different rates so they will unfreeze. Let cool completely or speed the process with water. If you tried the puller on the pulley before heating and didn't have success, the process above will almost certainly give you results. Sometimes slightly heating the pulley up again will free it.
Scott Deaver B&S Authorized Master Service Technician, June 2005
