IT’S ALIVE!!!!!!!! (the manure spreader)

[416Jonny]

Okay, yes, the title is a little excessive, I know. But sometimes you can’t help but want to yell it out loud once the magic begins.

So, first thing George and I tackled was the front end. The concern was the amount of play in the front end. Given that this manure spreader has been around for 80 or so years at least, there is bound to be a little slop. First order of business, taking the wheel hubs apart and seeing what can be done!

This particular axle arrangement used (hub?) caps that covered one end of the axle, held on by a set screw. Took that off, put a 12″ adjustable wrench on the square end and braced myself for some serious gruntin’ and cussin’. But, it spun off with little effort, much to my surprise.

[416Jonny]

Holding the hub together is a pin with an eccentric oblong head. A quick tap from the bottom and it was out. The neat thing about these old designs is how simple the whole thing is! The wheel is held in place with a collar that has three graduating steps. Because the wheel has no bearings, it rides directly on the collar and the end cap on the inside of the axle. As these parts wear, to reduce the play in the axle, you would simply remove the pin, turn the collar to the taller step and reinsert the pin. There by bringing everything closer together. Simple, durable, easy to understand.

[416Jonny]

Once the collar is off the axle, the wheel comes right off and reveals what’s left. The end cap to the hub! The axle has no type of seal, so taking this cap off is a breeze. Slides right off. Now we can start cleaning. A lot of paper towels and rubber gloves later, the old scummy grease is out of all the important stuff.

[416Jonny]

A quick note about the chemicals you might be in contact with. I couldn’t give you an MSDS or show you a health study involving every substance you could come in contact with, but I do know that it’s not good for you. Stories about gentlemen that have done wrenching all their lives end up with some very strange health problems. Rubber gloves are cheap insurance against whatever may be lurking in the deep, dark recesses of the industrial world. The really nice ones are the thicker blue gloves they sell at auto supply stores. Buy some, they are worth it. The amount of money (chump change) and time (you’re already in town) don’t even come close to what you’ll pay for later in life. Cancer isn’t fun. These things are not meant to be in your body. They are not inert.

Okay, now that everything is nice and clean it can all go back together. Slather on that grease! Since there are no bearings to pack and no seals to hold in the grease under pressure, stop worrying about filling the whole thing. It won’t stay. But a decent amount is important. Also, where you put the grease is important. Unlike a wheel hub of say, a car trailer, filling the cup of this machine with grease isn’t going to do anything except make a huge mess.

[416Jonny]

The end cap of the hub goes on first. Next is the wheel. Making sure both are seated all the way into the inside of the axle, put the collar on. Put the pin in a hole, check how much play you have and adjust. If you have too much play even on the tallest slot, it can be shimmed with thick washers. George’s spreader had an acceptable amount of play, so we didn’t end up running around trying to find one of these washers. Chances are, you’d have to make one yourself to fit. Not that it’s hard, time constraints and a gloomy cloud cover had us thinking that what we had would do just fine. These aren’t Italian super cars going 180mph, it’s more important that everything is solid and in good shape.

When adjusting your end play on one of these older axle types, you’re looking for no more than 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch. But that little bit of play is important. You don’t want to see the collar pushing the wheel against the end cap. That will only accelerate wear and make the wheels harder to turn. Too much play is just as bad. If the wheel has room to rock, that’s just as bad, if not worse than not enough play.

Cut, paste, repeat. Take care of the other side and you can start looking at other parts of the machine.

[416Jonny]

Our next step was the beaters. On the Massey-Harris, the main and top beaters were frozen solid. Things that are rusted solid always kinda make me uneasy. Not gonna lie, if it doesn’t move already, I get a little twinge in the back of my head that says: “I’m gonna be here a while”. Never fear though, because just about anything can be broken loose. In the pictures I’m posting, you’ll see how we went from no movement at all to a pretty smooth action.

When things are covered in rust and won’t move, you need a way to break that connection. A couple of ways to do this include penetrating oil, heat and shock. I put them up in order of chance to mess things up. Oil being the safest (and usually the most effective), heat being not such a great idea on fragile cast iron pieces and shock being just beating on the dang thing to see if movement in another direction can either be a miracle or a disaster. We had to use all three techniques to get the top beater to start moving.

To make a long story short, lots of PB Blaster and turning later, the top beater started moving. More turning and spraying. More movement. I think I see a pattern here. As the beater turned inside the cast iron hubs the scummy rust that was now soaked in Blaster came slowly gooing out of the hubs. More oil. More rusty goo.

If you’re really lucky and have your brain wired on straight (as in, you got to sleep before 12:30am the day that you’re taking off to a part of Vermont you’ve never been to before) you would have noticed those little nifty oil holes in the top of the cast iron hubs. It’s important to note the location of these holes, because it makes your job much easier. It’s also where the oil goes into before each time the manure spreader is used.

Now, the big main beater. It sure is big. It sure doesn’t seem to want to move. Whenever you have something big that doesn’t want to move, one good thing is that you can usually use a bigger form of leverage. In our case, George and I used a 10 or so foot long piece of iron pipe over the end of a monkey wrench. It took both of us to start with to be able to get the beater to turn and in the process the back end of that spreader was probably almost ready to lift off the ground.

The important part is just getting the stuff moving to start with. If it moves, even just a little, the hard part is over.

We needed to build a chain. Agricultural drive chains are easy to assemble and disassemble. Looking inside the joint, the opening in the loop can have one of the corners ground off lightly, turn the other chain a little to where it lines up with the opening in the loop and drive it down with a hammer. Assembling a chain is the opposite. Knock off a corner, line up the next link and drive it into place.

When deciding how long the chain needs to be there are a few considerations. First, these chains are held in place by a tensioner of some sort. If the tensioner is pulled out of place, then the chain can be taken off, or can just fall off in the field. Second is overall tension. When assembling a new chain, you want it as tight as can be installed on the machine! This is because the tensioner can only move so far, as well as preparing for chain stretch. This type of chain stretchs more than just about any type of chain design.

More and more oil. Plenty of turning. After all that and lunch, we were ready to give the machine a test drive. I’m sure some of you dyed in the wool draft animal fans will cringe when I tell you, but we first pulled it with the tractor. Never fear though, this was a safety consideration. There was no seat, no foot boards and no way to attach the horses. So out came the Kubota.

Ahhhh…..the magic is hard to describe. While George’s manure spreader was in pretty good shape to start with, to get it working took a little muscle, a little head scratching and a lot of PB Blaster. Nobody got hurt and we got it to function in a pretty reasonable amount of time. It was a success.

Thanks to George for letting me come out and tinker and thanks to everyone on the forum that is brave enough to engage in draft animal power.

Jonny B.

[TBigLug]

I know irt’s an old thread but I thought it was great. Very informative. Thanks.

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