Rollin', Rollin', Rollers on the OC-3

Please excuse the "Proud Mary" pun in the title (for those that got it).

My head was still spinning from the broken bull gear tooth so I looked for something easy to do next. The next project was to flip the track frames over and remove the 3 rollers on each track frame. I already knew just by looking at them that each rear roller was cracked in half.

The manual indicates this is a rather simple procedure. "Remove the stud nuts holding the wheel assembly to the track frame, allowing wheel to drop off studs."

Oh, only if it would be this easy, but 50 years of abuse, dirt, and rust tend to make everything more challenging. When I got the first roller loose I couldn't get the roller to get past the frame. It didn't have enough side clearance. I should have seen the problem but it was late and I wasn't seeing the whole picture. After an embarrassing post on http://www.cletrac.org/ I discovered that I had to simply remove the oil Zerk first then remove the roller. Proud Mary, I was not.

So the first couple of rollers came out fine. Then I had three rollers with mounting blocks that were seized to the frame. I finally made that trip to Fleet Farm for some higher end penetrating spray. After some heat, spray, walk-away - I only have one roller still giving me problems.

The pictures will show some good rollers (note the Oliver shield stamped in one of them), a cracked roller AND a roller that literally fell apart when I got it out.

The pictures below are of the shaft that fell out of the worst roller. I tried to capture the amazing amount of wear that the shaft has experienced. The close-up does a pretty good job of showing what used to be a perfectly round 1.5 inch shaft. One can only guess how long the shaft had been banging around in the roller to get to this state.

Side note: Up until now I have been blogging about past events. I've finally caught up so what you are reading is pretty much the current state of affairs. I'm going to see Mike the retired sheriff on Tuesday and see what he has for parts. I'm excited to see what he has and hopeful about a good price on this stuff.