AC engineering

[Bob]

What was so unique about AC transmission engineering (or lack thereof)?

Must be over 90% of the time when someone posts on an old tractor board about "jumping out of gear" or "popping out of gear" it's an AC????

 

[Janicholson]

Early Allis Chalmers (including WD-45 I think) used a variation of truck transmission. Other than the poor bent shifter 'feature" that can cause a side to side neutral "feel" that rotated the shaft in the tower, but didn't move it back and forth sideways. Several have been starter with a crank in gear. They (from my experiance) had no jump out issues issues. Jim

 

[Jim Phelps]

Most of those tractors that popped out of gear where caused by people who would grind the gears, I own 5 and none of them pop out of any gear. But some people do not have the patients to wait a few seconds for the gear to stop rotating and try to grind it into gear rounding off the edges etc.

 

[DrAllis]

All WC's and most WD's were a spur gear/sliding gear transmission. The late WD's (curved gearshift) all WD-45's, D-17's on up were a helical gear, constant mesh design transmission. The advantages over spur gears was a quieter transmission and stronger gears for more HP/torque. If you like to hear gear grinding and crunching, you eventually do enough damage that the shift couplings don't have anything to grab onto anymore and they start to jump out of gear when going downhill with a push behind you. The tractor will pull the plow all day long and be fine, but raise up the plow and go down a steep hill and it could pop into neutral. It is Operator abuse plain and simple.

 

[301]

A lot was operator abuse , but AC should have done something to fix this in my opinion, new 200 tractors jumped out of gear on the dealer lot brand new

 

[DrAllis]

Interesting. A new tractor on the lot ?? All I can say is, that was a pretty poor service oriented Dealership if they didn't get that taken care of under WARRANTY.

 

[Bill VA]

Is it true that a WD with the spur gear transmission will NOT jump out of gear when going down hill?

 

[DrAllis]

Probably. The problem only seems to be with the constant mesh helical gear trannys.