Hi all. Just a quick continuation of the thread I posted a little bit ago. This thread.

 The openers in the pictures of the previous thread were openers that had not been used this past fall/autumn. I had changed spacing for a specific use and had a few unused openers. Those were repaired with the bushings and seed tabs first.

 Now we get to the openers on the drill that were used last fall. I was having a devil of a time plugging opener boots and tubes. A trip over the drill with a bottle brush would only get me about 5 acres and boots or tubes were plugging again. After finishing the last field, I only had the opportunity to dig the big chunks off the drill and put it under cover before the freezing weather system we had came through. One opener plugged just as I was finishing up and I left it plugged to be able to diagnose the issue(s). Here's what I found.

 One view of the plugged opener.

 A closer view of the plug. The wet material would begin sticking to the boot and build up would continue as the leaf spring was too weak to keep the boot from flopping around as the boot mounting bolt was worn and the hole in the main arm was worn allowing the boot too much wiggle room. IMO.

 Same boot, but as you can see, a quick once over at the drill, would not show much sign of what was going on.

 Another boot, though not plugged, a lot of build up of wet material between the blade and the boot was causing some performance problems. Keeping in mind that the seed tab has a lot to do with this issue. The seed tab could over power the leaf springs trying to keep the boot in contact with the disk. More on the springs in a bit.

 Yet another boot. You can see the build up patterns are not the same for each boot. This IMO is caused by the slop in the boots mounting. That is why I bought the Needham ag bushing setup. We'll see soon enough if it was the right move or not.

 Here is one view of further build up caused by the "splashing" of water from the residue. The seed treatment would begin to build up on the boot as the seed hit the wet cast. It would be a nice touch to have some sort of smooth or polished surface in this area to keep this from happening. It is a limitation that should not be there.

 Here are the leaf springs. The left one represents the ones I removed, and the right is a new one from JD parts. It is difficult to get the true dimensional difference in a picture so....

 ...here is the new one as measured with a simple caliper.

 And the old spring measured in the same way. About .020" difference. A simple finger test proved nearly double the strength with the new one as opposed to the old one. I am hopefull that these new heavier springs will reduce the residue issues. However, Needham's new seed tabs are nearly 3 times as heavy as the stock ones. I hope the design change on the Needhams helps keep the boot tighter.

 Just figured I'd throw this little bit in for some that wonder about the boot mounting issues and the performance of the leaf spring.