Post by kevlar on Sept 25, 2020 21:16:47 GMT -6
So this is how my day went. Yesterday went out just before supper to try some canola, almost dry, close enough. Get close to a half hopper when my brother notices a sound like a dry bearing coming from the feeder house somewhere, hard to find much because you can't turn anything good enough with the chain on to see what might be the problem. Of course this couldn't have happened the day before when we quit because it was too green, tough, had to be 15 minutes into the day later after it had dried enough from the rain the night before. Disconnect what we can to try find the noise. Only conclusion was the feeder house has to come off and maybe take the chain off to see. Not a horrible job removing it, would be nicer if we had a tractor with a better 3 point hitch that we trusted more, but worked anyway. All the bearings look good. Take off the feeder chain, drive shaft has a tight spot. But the two bearings looked good, they don't have seals so you can see the rollers, all good. I'm looking at the shaft and think, "surely to Christ that isn't a bearing in the middle of the shaft, is it?" Start to remove all the shields that stop stuff from wrapping on the shaft. The shaft was broken. Remove some more of the shields, and yes there is a bearing in the middle of the shaft, just right of being center. Bearing is gone. Now how the hell is a guy supposed to tell if that bearing is going? Can't grease it, can't even see it without a couple hours of tearing things apart. Now in an ideal world the tapered keys that hold the sprockets in place would come out as they should, and the bearings on the ends would come off, even with a pulley. Now in my world, it doesn't work like that. After several hours of screwing around, I torched out the bearings, removed the two halves of the shaft, and was so pissed about this that we put ll new parts in, new sprockets and the $25 a piece tapered keys that hold them. Not sure what happened first, did the bearing go allowing more movement in the shaft causing it to break? Or the other way around? Will never know. Got a bit of a surprise on the cost for all this. I thought the shaft would be 2 grand, was only 800. Read somewhere the bearings on the ends were crazy expensive, I think were only a hundred bucks and a bit, never seen a bearing like this before, it is like 2 halves of a tapered roller bearing back to back. Sprockets were 125 for one style, 135 for the other style, so all in all it cost about 1800 dollars, plus probably saved us at least 2000 for a service call.
Do other makes have a bearing in the center of the feeder shaft like New Holland does?
