On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:17:24 -0500, "Karl Townsend"
wrote:

Hey Karl - When you get *that* good at doing the repair, it's time
for you to stop tilting at windmills and make some wholesale changes.

That's the time I would get frustrated, call the local Case or John
Deere dealer and see if they did it any better. See about trading in
one of the old Ford tractors, where someone who only plans to pull a
gang-mower and not pound on the PTO can get a lot more use out of it.

Ya, its just a math problem for me. I got a new Deere for $40 K. I can
rebuild a clutch for about $250. You do the math, I need four.

First order of business - Does the Deere clutch design hold up to
the work loads any better?

Second: Can you redesign the implement to lessen the load on the PTO
Clutches? Or redesign the clutch to handle the load better - someone
might have developed a retrofit kit to use a more robust clutch.

If it's a hydraulic load, you can put the pump off the crankshaft
instead of the PTO? Or you have a split hydraulic/driveshaft load,
you split the hydraulics to the crank and only leave the brush-hog
drive on the PTO clutch, or....

I don't know what you are doing or how, but if you think it through
there is often more than one way to skin a problem. Feel free to
elaborate, and we (the collective newsgroup) might be able to come up
with an elegant solution.

And of course you don't swap out all four tractors at once - you
wait for the Deere dealer to get a bit hungry (or wants to do the
model-year changeover) and offer a nice deal. Then pick the Ford that
is oldest and/or highest hours on the engine, and trade it off. And
in a few years, you do it again.

-- Bruce --