Help! Ford 20-16 Manure Spreader disaster

[NY 986]

That could be. But you'd be surprised at how many fabrications shops now have decent plasma or laser tables, and how fast and (comparatively) inexpensively they can kick out parts. Including the place where I work, there are three fab shops with plasma or laser tables within a couple miles of each other here. And because you can buy weld-in hubs that are already bored & keyed, the only thing you need at home is a welder.

You know your area but around here there are not any job shops for farmers to walk into. Machine shops and fabricators want to tool up and make a deep production run to get a low cost per unit on production. Even the Amish shop several miles up the road from me is that way. When I worked for a small time farm equipment builder that made land rollers, bean windrowers, and bean combines 25 years ago they were pushing jobs out of the building to concentrate on manufacturing farm equipment. Given my job title there it put me at odds with farmers who had long expected immediate action on something they wanted repaired. If I needed a gear made like the OP I honestly would not know where to go at least in my region of the US.

 

[showcrop]

I've made up a few ratchet gears like that, and think that I've come up with (in my opinion) a pretty good method for making them fairly cheaply. One was for an IH 175 manure spreader that had blown apart exactly like yours. I would have brazed it myself if I'd had all the pieces, but one of them went AWOL. The others I've made have all been for circular sawmill carriages, where the setworks use the same type of ratchet & pawl setup. They get worn over time and the teeth don't grab anymore. I made one of them just a couple of weeks ago, and have the sketch here in front of me.

They key to making parts cheaply is to find ways of making them that avoid setup and machining time. If you can figure out a way to make them that only involves cutting pieces on a plasma/laser table and welding together yourself you'll be able to make anything fairly inexpensively.

What I do: I draw up the wheel profile in CAD with holes for plug welding and a centre hole just a smidge larger than the O.D. of a standard weld-in hub. Have a few of these gears torched out of 1/2" or 3/8" plate (I spec AR plate as we have that on the laser table all the time at work, but for an old spreader that only sees a few hours a year I'm sure regular mild steel will be fine). Once they're cut, stagger the discs so the teeth are still in-line but the plug-welding holes are offset, then plug weld them together to effectively make a gear the right thickness. In this case I used four 1/2" thick pieces to end up with a 2" thick gear. Unfortunately you can't just have it torched out of 2" thick plate, because the thicker you go on a plasma/laser table, the less precise the cuts are and the teeth and gullets would be too rounded.

I can tell you how much this one cost me: $90 for the steel discs cut on the plasma table. $11 for the weld-in hub ordered from 'Forces Inc. (plus $14 shipping). But unfortunately it would cost you more to have done. Because I can draw it up in CAD myself I save that charge. And because I buy this through our industrial/steel store at work I can send the template down and say, "Hey, burn these for me the next time you have 1/2" AR450 on the table", which saves quite a bit of cost as I'm not charged for all of the handling and setup for that plate thickness on the table (which is where most of the shop time is spent when cutting things on a table). And I do get a small discount on material (though not on labour).

Even so, I suspect you could have this done for your spreader $350 or less if you found the right shop and weld the discs together yourself. Any fab shop worth their salt these days has a plasma or laser table. The only consideration you might have to make is how precise and fine their table is capable of cutting the teeth. They may have to do a trial cut and show you to see if the teeth turn out sharp/meaty enough. If not, you may have to change the template so there are fewer teeth, which allows you to make the teeth more meaty so they turn out better on the plasma/laser table. I'm lucky as our laser table at work (and even our plasma table) will cut up to 3/4" plate with superb resolution. But I know a lot of tables aren't nearly as good. If I tried to do that on the old plasma table at my previous job, the teeth would have come out looking like bumpy, rounded lumps.

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I almost suggested the same sort of thing yesterday. But I wasn't thinking in terms of 1/2 inch stock. Would this be more economical if two were cut from 1/4 inch stock, and DC Stickney welds them together himself?

 

[DanielW]

I almost suggested the same sort of thing yesterday. But I wasn't thinking in terms of 1/2 inch stock. Would this be more economical if two were cut from 1/4 inch stock, and DC Stickney welds them together himself?

It could be. I was assuming that the OP would be welding them together himself regardless. I'm guessing that the original gear is 1-1/2"to 2" thick or so? So whether it's three-to-four pieces cut from 1/2" or six-to-eight pieces form quarter inch, he'd still be welding them together himself. The ones I've made have been with 1/2" gears that I weld together myself. But the only reason I typically go with 1/2" is because we cut a lot of 1/2" AR plate on the table at work all the time. If we had 1/4", 3/8", 5/8", or 3/4" AR on the table regularly,. I'd go with whatever was being cut.