TYE no till drill rebuild

[Frank S]

Not sure how many farmers or ranchers there are in this bunch, so I will give a brief explanation of what a no till drill does. This particular model was a 14 ft seed drill which would cut open a small trench and deposit seeds or legumes and fertilizer without the need to first plow and disk the field.
Back in late 2013 friend of mine bought the thing at a real bargain price the only thing was he knew nothing about it or how it was supposed to work He could see it had a few issues that needed repairing so he brought it to me to make it work as best it could.
I convinced him that if I did that he would forever be cussing me every-time it broke down in the field, that the only way to really fix it would be to tear it down to the last bolt and rebuild it then he would have a tool that would last him for several years seeding 1000's of acres of land.
here are a few of the surviving photos that I have of the process
It started out like this all of the drive chains were missing many of the disk and colters were worn below minimum size all of the seeder registers were deteriorated the fertilizer box was rusted out some of the shafts were bent the main tool bar was bent sprockets were missing feed tubed missing and broken bolts everywhere but from 100 feet away if you stood at just the right angle it looked ready for the field

I began tearing it down





Not all of these pictures are in order but now the clean up and rebuild
Every piece and part had to be inspected some needed welding some straightening some parts had to be made new using the remants of the old parts as templets

[Frank S]

A couple more
I wore out 30 cup and flat brushes on my grinders 400 lbs of sand went through my HF 90 lb sand blaster 2 gallons of etching primer 4 gallons of orange paint 24 cans of green spray paint 20 cans of black spray paint and found a local sing and decal company to create all of the logo and stripes exactly the same as the factory ones from detailed pictures I sent them
Every plastic part was replaced with new parts Every bearing was replaced half of the colters had to be replaced and several of the cutter disks as well
I had to heli coil every bolt hole in the aluminum castings that the colter disk bolt to
Ever try to find 5/8 11 left hand helicoils and left hand bolts that were 1 1/4" long I had to buy all of the sprockets then make the hubs for them because of their small bore size. I made some of the linkages by having to guess what they looked like and I had to create a complete feed rate clutch system from pictures I had seen of other machines with no dimensional frame work other than knowing the diameter and tooth count of the sprockets


One very happy guy taking his brand new drill home

After he got it back to his truck dealership and shop he parked it right out next to the highway for 6 months because he said it was too pretty to put in the field but in truth he didn't know how to use it. One day he called me to show him how to adjust the settings, we took it to the field and drilled 40 acres
By the way this is the same guy that I rebuilt those welding machines for you can find them in my build profile

[DIYer]

Thanks Frank S! We've added your No Till Drill Refurbish to our Heavy Equipment category,
as well as to your builder page: Frank S's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

No Till Drill Refurbish by Frank S

tags: farm tools