Hagen Brothers farms,Goodrich ND | I believe the inside storage has a lot to do with it., it seems sealed bearings wick in a lot of moisture from snow / frost / sweating / rain when outside.
I had good luck with the type 1 closing wheels after adding the IH drill disc seals in place of the flat washers. That cone shaped rubber washer was a good fit over the HD JD bearing seal and really helped keep dirt and water out of them.
The type 2 with the two standard bearings and the separate seal worked good after I learned how to service them. I learned to make sure the wheel wear ring was smooth with no wear or corrosion, and the seal lips were in good condition. a good cleaning of the seal and packing the seal lips with poly urea grease which has a higher oil to thickener content than any other grease, so the seal stays lubed longer. I cleaned and repacked the seals in the type 2 wheels every 4,000 acres (30 ft of drills) and usually would only find dirty grease beyond the first seal lip, so I could have extended that another 1000 acres. It also seemed to help to put a layer of grease around the flange of the metal dust covers before installing them to better seal out dust and moisture.
The Thompson wheels have had no service for aprox 10,000 acres with no bearing failures.
My drills are the very early models 89-90 ?, so they did not have replaceable bushings and pins on the closing wheel arms. The big opener arms do not have enough metal around the pin holes to allow the thick wall, late model JD powered iron bushings to be fitted, so I went with a jobber oilite bronze bushing only 1/16 thick. I was a bit afraid that the bronze bushings might be too soft to stand the load, but they have had little wear and no seizing problems in over 20,000 acres, they are run without grease. The closer wheel arms have the original non replaceable. welded in pins replaced with late 750 bolt in pins that have the dry lube coating on them.
We also had a couple spare wheels set up with new bearings PRESSED into the wheels and a driver to correctly install new seals with poly urea grease to lube them. Others in our area also had a lot of bearing trouble and seemed to not understand that those seals needed to be clean and well lubed to live, some assembles the wheel with no lube on the seals and burned up set after set without realizing what they were doing wrong.
Edited by Jon Hagen 12/19/2007 11:21
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Shoup Manufacturing
