Manure Spreader Restoration Part 1!

[Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] well i finally got my hands on a manure spreader and while this thing is no spring chicken i think with a little bit of work she's still got some good miles in her today i want to start taking this apart and just sort of making a list of all the things that i need to buy and all the things that i'm going to need to do to put this back into service that's what we're doing today on farmer tyler ranch [Music] if this manure spreader looks familiar to you guys it's because you might have seen it before this was parked over at the winter pasture for the last couple of years and it was hidden away in a barn at an old dairy before that the guy that owns the winter pasture actually owns this as well he knew that i was looking for a manure spreader and long story short before you knew it i was getting a phone call to come pick this thing up if that wasn't cool enough before max had me come get it he put new tires on it which is awesome upon getting this thing the first thing that i wanted to try to do was to sort of figure out who made it what the model was if the company was still in business and if i might be able to buy parts for it still if i should need any after digging around a little bit i i think i'm going to be pretty much on my own on this one if i need anything i'll have to make it myself or possibly retrofit it off of something else because this thing is old and i'm not sure exactly how old it is but let me share with you what i figured out this spreader is called an iron age or farquahar which i'm probably saying that incorrectly but by looking at the id badge on the tongue here that's about what i was able to figure out now iron age is the brand farquahar is the guy's name that owned the company near as i can figure this company dates back to the mid to late 1800s and they were originally known for building steam-powered tractors and steam engines boilers things like that from what i gather the company was was actually quite successful during that era when there was a demand for steam-powered tractors but as time rolled on and the gasoline engine became king their sales kind of started to drop off and from what i can understand oliver bought them out in the 1930s some somewhere in that era and and with the steam tractors being phased out they started to focus a little bit more on implements and based on my research it looks like they kind of went out of business in the late 1940s um i don't think they actually made anything in the 50s so that dates this thing to somewhere i would say during the 1940s i i don't think it's any older than that honestly the metal would have to be in a lot worse shape if it was i'm not absolutely certain on this timeline this was just based off of an article that i was able to find about the farquhar company so for the for the purposes of this video we're just going to say that they were right now i'm thinking because this is from that sort of mid to late 40s time period that it would be really cool to pull this around with the jubilee when i am spreading manure the jubilee is from 1953 this let's say is 1948 so while the jubilee is a little bit newer than this spreader it is totally reasonable to think that there was a time when there was a guy pulling this with the jubilee and that was like considered pretty modern equipment so i i don't know i just feel like i want to kind of recreate that because i have that tractor and now with the switch to round bales i'm not going to have that many jobs for it but i think spreading manure is gonna be a perfect job for it [Music] so while the timeline on this thing is a little bit unclear what i do know about it is that when i try to pull the engagement lever here to engage the drive system the lever itself does move freely but where it engages back here at the tire is froze up so i think what i'm gonna have to do first is just take all of these shields and guards off and just kind of see what we've gotten here c i've got one more bolt holding this guard on but i think i've been using the wrong size wrench i think this is the wrench that i need [Music] [Music] well it's a good thing i didn't try to do this last summer because these these here are wasp nests and if those were active right now i would not be in this shop i'd be running for my life a couple more down here [Music] [Applause] [Music] with all the guards taken off of this thing i can get a better look at all the rust and wasp nests and black widows and all the good stuff that's been hiding under here for years and years as i look at these chains some of them don't look terrible i mean really i probably need to replace all of them soon but i think what i will do with like on the detachable link chains um these aren't going to wear quite like a roller chain does so i'm hoping that maybe i can just dip this thing in diesel for a couple of days and that might loosen it up and get it good enough to at least be able to determine if this thing is going to work this detachable link drive chain here that drives the spinners i guess i i mean honestly i'm not that familiar with manure spreaders i'm not sure what you call these things but they obviously spin so spinner sounds like a good one but anyway this chain is a little bit too short you should be able to like twist this in such a way where the links come apart but i don't have enough slack in the chain and i i have removed the tensioner here so i think the way this was probably assembled and the only way that i'm going to be able to get it off without cutting it is to try to take one of these sprockets off of there and i'm a little bit nervous about that because you know these things can seize on there and be almost impossible to remove without a torch but we got to give it a try so i've got a little set screw right here that is presumably going through this sprocket and into the shaft and the reason and i already loosened it so that's why it appeared to come off so easily but i'm pretty much sure that's what this is because it's got a little set nut or a jam nut there and we'll know when we see the end of it the way it's cupped out on the bottom that's how you know that it's a set screw so this is the only one that i can see on there there might be another one in the back hiding in the grease but i'm hoping that this will just slide off of there now i'm having flashbacks from when i worked at the rice dryer because i dealt with a lot of power transmission stuff like this and a lot of times these do not like to come off so hopefully this one is gonna be different oh wow wow that was too easy come on oh wow okay i feel lucky now well i lucked out on this top sprocket it actually slid off of there really easily and hopefully that's an indication of how the rest of this is gonna all come apart although i kind of doubt it but anyway now that the chain is off i can get it soaking i think i'm gonna put it in some used motor oil just because i just happen to have a bucket of that sitting here right now and it's you know free whereas diesel is not um so anyway i'll get that soaking try to get it cleaned up tomorrow the other purpose of removing these chains is that i can go through and see which things on the spreader are froze up you know once the chain is off of there you you can test each individual thing without it being linked to anything else and therefore determine if it's good or not so this top spinner we're all free on this side obviously and on the other side we just have this uh bushing here this might be a bearing but i really doubt it it looks like most of this is put together with bushings i'm not really sure why there is this big cover like that that's a little bit different to me um so i might just have to take this apart you know just to see what's in there but i'm probably gonna have to take it apart anyway because this top spinner is completely seized up it is not moving at all i think before i dive in here and start ripping all this apart because this is a cast iron housing here and i'm very very worried about breaking it because once i break that i mean i i don't really know what what's next so let me put a pipe wrench on this uh sprocket here and just see if this thing will turn uh that it might just need a little bit you know to kind of break it free and if that's the case well you know what let's just try it all right well i'll save us some time all right well that's moving now that's really good um but i don't know if the audio is going to come through or not for you guys but it's very rough uh not smooth feeling at all so i think i still want to try to take these covers off but i feel a little bit better about doing that now because these um these are actually needle bearings i think i i thought i could see the end of like a needle bearing in there but these are free now so they should slide off i'm hoping that that this whole this whole assembly here kind of uh will come off there's probably some ancient grease in there maybe some dirt got in there over the years um so yeah if we can if we can get that all cleaned out running good again that's probably the right thing to do will these budge [Music] wow i'm getting lucky with this thing i guess the nice part about working on something that was built in the 40s is i never have to question if it's a metric bolt or a standard hole i know they're all standard so gonna be like that is it so what i'm thinking here is i want to try to slide this little bearing housing off the shaft and then maybe get some sort of an idea of what's going on i don't know if this is like a gearbox here or what the deal is but i'm hoping if i can slide this off then i'll have sort of a better look at what's going on so in order to do that i need to get this way out this is what's called a woodruff key and it's like a half circle or a half moon so a lot of times you can hit them from the top and they'll kind of rotate up and you can pull them out this one's been in here for possibly a hundred years and it seems a bit stuck so i'm gonna see i don't want to gum it up because then the sprocket won't slide on there very good but if i can just kind of get it moving and if i need to come back on it with the grinder there we go that's probably i mean i probably should just get a new key honestly oh this looks like it might be fancy though i've never seen a wood drift key quite like this where it has the little ears on both sides usually it's just a perfect half circle now i'm going to see if i can slide this annie it's going a little bit but it seemed like it just wanted to stop right there so obviously the good idea is to get a bigger pry bar these might be too big tough to tell but i think it is gone so one way i'll be able to see if i'm making progress i get all the grease off of this shaft and i'll be able to to kind of gauge it and see what what we're doing if anything but i believe it didn't come out some oh yeah it's going for sure just when i said nothing's gonna be easy so i am staring at this thing trying to understand how this works and i started kind of fiddling with the screwdriver here and i think i can pry this cover off so i'm going to do that because right now this just does not make any sense why this has to have grease in it it just i don't know so maybe to get this off it'll be a little bit more obvious why well this is making more sense now if you can see you've got like a little arm here with a sort of a pin on the end and the end of this arm is going into this flipper so so there's that now on the inside of the cover we've got this sort of oblongs uh not not a perfect oval but just kind of an odd shape here my best guess is that as this is turning these these individual bars are getting like an extra little flip there and that probably helps feed the manure i'm not really sure if you guys understand how that works or why it's like that let me know because i i'm wanting to learn all i can about this thing man you want to talk about some nasty old grease this stuff is something else some fresh grease in there this thing ought to purr [Music] [Applause] all right well it looks like i have a lot of cleaning in my future not only am i going to have to clean up these dogs and everything on this side but i've got to clean up the cap on the other side and then i have to do it all over again on the other side of the spreader because it looks like it's the exact same setup over there and i'm sure it's in the exact same condition but none of that's very interesting to watch and i think that i'm gonna wrap this video up here thanks for hanging out in the shop with me today guys and i hope i'll see you again on farmer tyler ranch [Music] do [Music] so

Channel: Farmer Tyler Ranch

Views: 25,221

Keywords: Manure spreader, Iron Age, Farquhar, Restoration, Farm equipment, Antique, Farmer Tyler ranch, Sonne farms, Our Wyoming Life, Stoney ridge Farmer, Just a few acres farm

Id: z1vw4oXERa8

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021