Chain Drive

[unclehan]

Are there any tractors, harvestors, tillers, or any agricultural machinery that uses chain drive as one of its component?

Thanks

 

[slowrev]

Chain drives are used on some tillers, many hay rollers, and several other attachments. A couple of older tractors were chain drive, but that is long past.

Ben

 

[skent]

My 1950 Case DC (and the SC and LA's) are chain drive from the differential shaft to the rear axle. It's (huge) 120 pitch chain and a not too difficult to replace. One for the left, one for the right. Case's logic at the time was the chain would distribute the load over many teeth where on a gear to gear drive only has two or three teeth taking all the load. I only had to replace one chain (on my 55 year old tractor) and that was due to a failure of the connector link.

 

[ScottAR]

Case carried that design all the way through the 30 series Cases up to the 930 (80-90hp) and maybe the 1030 (100hp).

 

[unclehan]

It seems chains are a lot cheaper than shaft drives, so how come it's not widely used?

 

[ScottAR]

Most tractors have the differential/final drive mated to the trans. so no drive shaft per say is used. Also as Case found out, 90-100hp is right at the limit for chain reliablity. The 70 series and everything after the 30's featured an all gear drivetrain to my knowledge.

 

[KennyV]

Motor Graders and Skid steer loaders use chain in their final drives… and all Track equipment use ‘chain’ as one of its components, the track itself is a large chain with pads attached /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif. KennyV.

 

[milkman]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( It seems chains are a lot cheaper than shaft drives, so how come it's not widely used? )</font>

Also used because of the effecient transfer of power, but some would want you to believe they are bad, bad, bad, when used to drive a tiller. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif

 

[Egon]

Think tere is a chain somewhere in the transfer case of my truck. Its a little over 90 HP.

Egon /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[hobbyfarm]

Sears used to have their bottom basement lawn rider with an exposed chain drive.
Extremely Cheesy! And, a constant state frustration and melancholy for the user.
I had one, used it a year and sold it for $50.00 more than I paid for it. This was many moons ago. I doubt if they still use that drive system.