Will Herring
Well-known Member
I may have posted about some of this before, but I set about a few months ago to rebuild the Knoedler seat on my Allis Chalmers WD, and it has been quite an adventure. I've utilized a local machine shop, a local weld shop, several online vendors to source various bearings, fasteners and other odds and ends, and finally have it put back together!
Here's the "before" pictures where it comes off the tractor and I cut it apart with a dremel and an angle grinder and press out the old bearings.
And now here's where a local shop welds up the wallered out holes for me and redrills them, a machine shop pressed out my stuck pin and makes me two new sleeves and fixes the broken grease zerks, and then I press in the new bearings and mount everything back together again with various hardware until it feels decent when it swings up and down.
It's been quite an adventure to get to this point, but I am so happy with how it is turning out. Now just need to take it back apart, do some clean-up and painting on it before it goes back on the tractor. Nearly 70 years of wear and tear being taken back out of this seat; it's seen a lot of acres of usage, that's for sure (probably most of it from '53 to '83).
Here's the "before" pictures where it comes off the tractor and I cut it apart with a dremel and an angle grinder and press out the old bearings.
And now here's where a local shop welds up the wallered out holes for me and redrills them, a machine shop pressed out my stuck pin and makes me two new sleeves and fixes the broken grease zerks, and then I press in the new bearings and mount everything back together again with various hardware until it feels decent when it swings up and down.
It's been quite an adventure to get to this point, but I am so happy with how it is turning out. Now just need to take it back apart, do some clean-up and painting on it before it goes back on the tractor. Nearly 70 years of wear and tear being taken back out of this seat; it's seen a lot of acres of usage, that's for sure (probably most of it from '53 to '83).