Monthly Archives: November 2018

The Big Dripper

A friend I used to go to school with became a mechanic for IH after high school. We called him Jiggles. Every time you would call him out (later, when he’d struck out on his own and was affordable) to fix something he would jiggle the wires and it would start working again.

Jiggles used to say that if us farmers would only realize how cheap oil rings were compared to all the oil a leaking fitting drips out in a day of running the price of oil would go down. No the oil thing was mine, he would only say we’d call him out more often.

It’s not like he wouldn’t fix a leak if he saw it while he was there doing something else. That’s when he’d say it. Today I did my part to drive down that oil price. I installed a few seal kits on my 1440’s hydro static driver and driven motors.

I wish I had done it a couple years ago. They do get gradually worse at leaking and I was to an expensive point. Then when the line turning on the header and feeder house had a wire harness wear through it and leaked out the machine was completely drained so no better time.

Just like the last time I added o rings to the driver’s cans another leak shows up that was eclipsed by the other three. It’s not the distance, it’s the direction. There’s a belt and a spline that eventually needs to be replaced on the input shaft side of the driver.

When either of those repairs come online the driver’s input shaft’s o ring can be installed simultaneously. The final one. Until then The Big Dripper will become a more easily lifted Little Dripper. I can’t bench press what I once could and now wished I’d never tried that.

But we were young bucks then …….

There

Cc

 

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