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Just was looking at a few oddball pulleys and some of the blower parts and got to wondering, I know my old blower has some rust and pitting on the drive and idler pulleys but it doesn't really seem to be causing a noticeable issue in belt wear. I wondered just how bad they have to be before they really start chewing up belts. I suspect it has more to do with the shape of the pit than if it's there, IE: a rough pointed edge will act like a cutting surface while a rounded smooth edge will likely just get polished.
I'm also thinking about trying to replace the bearings in the idler pulleys I have, the bearings look like common ones but the sheave is not made to allow replacement, I'm thinking about testing a couple ideas, one using a lathe to cut one side of the bearing cap off, replace the bearing and weld the cap back on. The other will be to use a drill press and a hole saw to do basically the same thing, just for those without a lathe. Any thoughts?

Assuming you are discussing the 450/451 throwers, replacement pulleys are available from MTD.

At the end of the season I remove the belt and all pulleys get a spray coat of paint.

In this case it's a 450. I'm just wondering how bad do they have to get before they actually start causing problems. The ones on my first 451 have some pitting and don't seem to damage the belt, usually the belt ends up getting burnt when the blower eats a frozen newspaper or rock. Never seems to break the 50 cent shear pins though !! As for the bearings, They are common as dirt items, and the one I did cut apart was easy to replace. Might get to test it soon. My biggest thing is that there are getting to be multiple parts that are not available, so do we just scrap a very capable machine because the company stops supporting it or can we come up with a viable repair that the average person can do.

Yeah, I know it's been a while, but better late than never??

Steve... when I'm working on something that has pulleys that're rusty, what I do is explore my scrap cans for something roundish through 'em, don my safety glasses, and introduce the V section to bench-mounted wire wheel. I let the pulley spin, it scrubs off the crud and smooths out 'biteys'.

Realize, that rubber is pretty effective at 'cutting' steel... and anything abrasive that happens to get 'stuck' to that rubber, makes it awesomely cutting. A rubber wheel, dusted with a little garnet, will cut through some ghastly-hard steels with nary a complaint.

A steel sheave that has big rusty chunks ain't good for a belt, but pitting isn't a big problem... after some running hours, it will clean itself up by aforementioned environmental circumstances.

Sheave smoothness is a two-sided story... the down-side to a pitted sheave, is that it reduces belt contact surface... the up-side is that a little pitting tends to help 'toss out' contaminants that get in the belt... as long as they're not grease.

Another (pronounced 'crude but effective' method, is to pop the belt off the sheave while on the machine, and use a wire wheel in a 4" grinder, and rotate it a few turns...

That's about what I thought as well. I'm at the moment pulling the 54" deck off my mower tractor, Not sure what occurred yet but it tore a chunk out of the deck belt as nice as if I had split it off with a skiving knife. I'm also tempted to toss the center pulley from the 317 on it and see if it really increases the blade speeds much. That deck is very blah when it hits any real grass.