Cheap Tractor Spindle Repair

Cheap Tractor Spindle Repair TRACTORS Tires/Wheels 27-2-39 Maurice Tack thought he was going to have to junk his mid-1970's vintage David Brown 1210 mechanical front wheel drive tractor. He'd broken a spindle on the front axle and the $900 price the dealer quoted him for the new part would have been hard to justify. It wasn't the first time he'd broken a spindle on it. "My dad bought the tractor new in 1976. It came with a Kramer front end. When that one broke, we hunted around and found the front end from a mid-1980s 1390 David Brown that would work. "The spindles on these tractors are inherently weak," says the Valier, Montana farmer. "They're made of cast iron and have a groove cut in them all the way around where the bearing and seal are mounted." Instead of buying a new spindle, he called Tim Nickol, who runs Precision Machine and Welding in nearby Conrad, Montana. "I asked him if he could weld the cast iron pieces back together," Tack recalls. "He said he could do better than that." He started with a piece of solid steel, not cast, and made a piece that was identical to the one that broke off. He had to machine it from a solid round bar, heat-shrinking the metal, and finally, welding the new piece to the cast iron, he explains. Tack recently broke the other spindle and Nickol repaired that one, too. Nickol says he used 4140 chrome-moly steel shaft to make the new spindles. "It has probably twice the hardness as the original cast material, so I don't think there's any way he's going to break these. But if he does, I can make him another one," he says. Tack says Nickol's fix cost around $450, or about half the price of the new part. He says there are hundreds of older David Brown mechanical front wheel drive tractors out there with problem spindles, and he figures a good machinist like Nickol can put a lot of them back to work. "This is my back-up tractor now. It's only 68 hp, but I use it all the time for loader work, pounding fence posts, and gravel work. I move bales, clean corrals, and set up building trusses with it. It has about 12,000 hours on it and is still going," he says. "I want to keep this one going because it's hard to find a small loader tractor with front wheel assist for a reasonable price these days." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Maurice Tack, 78 Tower Road, Valier, Mont. 59486 (ph 406 278-3887); or Tim Nickol, Precision Machine and Welding, Four 8th Ave. N.E., Conrad, Mont. 59425 (ph 406 278-5095).

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