Possible de-alignment of flywheel at Arbtrak190?

[Mick Dempsey]

You can never be 100% sure what’s going through, especially if it’s a hedge removal, wire and stuff.

 

[maybelateron]

15 minutes ago, Mick Dempsey said:

You can never be 100% sure what’s going through, especially if it’s a hedge removal, wire and stuff.

One of my men put an electric fencing stake through. Amazing how little damage it did in fact. Few weeks later he put a steel karabiner through. 

[monkeybusiness]

21 minutes ago, swinny said:

****************  me. I thought I had some animals work for  me before but that's the 2023 award for worst chipper disc surely.

 

Not surprised bearings are shot

The edges chip off when the front bearing fails and the disks ‘tickle’ the anvil…

@Mike Hill - that front bearing mounting is the same design as the 1928 machines. I’ve been running those for ever, and still have a 2005 machine with well over 3000 hours on it now (which goes out working most weeks). I’ve never had any issues with structural part of these chippers, the design works well. 

[Soeren]

Just now, monkeybusiness said:

The edges chip off when the front bearing fails and the disks ‘tickle’ the anvil…

@Mike Hill - that front bearing mounting is the same design as the 1928 machines. I’ve been running those for ever, and still have a 2005 machine with well over 3000 hours on it now (which goes out working most weeks). I’ve never had any issues with structural part of these chippers, the design works well. 

 

Ok, so finally the assumption is something unwanted (stone, metal piece, whatsoever shitty...) got into, shaked the whole flywheel shaft so heavily that at least the front bearing broke, one knife hit the anvil, the others not however. If you are sitting in front of 2~3 meter high hills of bushes and branches, I suppose it just happened that we throw in something that shaked the whole construction so much. Either we were lucky or the Arbtrak is just so sturdy, but I can remember that we chipped 5~10 minutes after hearing that strange sound and only then turned the machine down.

[monkeybusiness]

43 minutes ago, Soeren said:

 

Ok, so finally the assumption is something unwanted (stone, metal piece, whatsoever shitty...) got into, shaked the whole flywheel shaft so heavily that at least the front bearing broke, one knife hit the anvil, the others not however. If you are sitting in front of 2~3 meter high hills of bushes and branches, I suppose it just happened that we throw in something that shaked the whole construction so much. Either we were lucky or the Arbtrak is just so sturdy, but I can remember that we chipped 5~10 minutes after hearing that strange sound and only then turned the machine down.

I think the foreign object is a red herring - we’ve accidentally chipped all sorts of nasty stuff over the years (plenty of steel rebar etc) and it doesn’t tend to destroy bearings (not immediately anyway). The bearing being worn and failing will have caused the flywheel gap to alter which will have caused the metallic sound you heard as the blades struck the anvil in use - this contact will have mullered your blades. 
That’s what I reckon anyway!

[Jase hutch]

100% agree 👍 

[Mike Hill]

I am not sure you can use the words " Greenmech" and "good design" in the same sentence. 

 

Hope the owner gets it sorted by jacking up the bonnet and rolling a Jensen in underneath it.

[Soeren]

Ha, totally forgot to close this thread - actually my wife just reminded me with some fotos as I did the repair a year ago 🤣 Thanks to Ashley from GA Groundcare I did not only got hold of all required spare parts to perform the repair very quickly, but he also provided very good assistance via WA on some tricky parts of the "operation". It was a little bit over what I'd normally do in my workshop, required special tools to remove the old bearings and two new holes to be drilled to fit in a new design of the large flywheel bearing, but everything works fince since then and I'm just finishing the second winter period of forrestal work in our estate with the repaired ArbTrak 👍

Thanks for everybody helping on this issue!