Hope that you never see your HST like this

[dannydan3]

What caused the fluid leak?

The PTO shaft for the MMM deck was not completely locked on the "Tractor" end of the shaft, causing it to thrash around under there and rip a hole in the Trans filter. I shut the deck down immediately when I heard it, and promptly headed back to the garage to see what happenedm, then the machine stopped moving. It was then that I saw all of the fluid behind me.
Towed it back to the garage and flushed the fluid, cleaned the screen, replaced the filter, and filled it back up with Super HST.
Everything seemed fine until I was doing some heavy work for an extended period of time when the dreaded noise started.

The dealer said that I wasn not the first person that this had happened to.
I also replaced the entire pto shaft when I had the HST fixed, just to make sure I had a perfect balanced shaft down there.
Needless to say I triple check the engagement every time I put on the deck...