PTO to flat belt drive converter for old hammermill.

[dixiedrifter]

So I'm in the process of cleaning out my grandfathers barn and am thinking about trying to get his old hammermill back up and running. I don't have too much information on it other than it was made by Myers Sherman and has "FORDS" written on the sides, the business part is 12" wide, and made an awful racket and big clouds of dust back when I was a kid. I'm thinking it might be a circa 1930's or 1940's model. We used to pull it with a an Allis Chalmers D-14 belt pulley and if you put enough corn in it the hammermill would bog down the tractor. Here are a couple pics:

Anyways, since the D-14 is now gone I'm without a way to power this beast. Unfortunately driving directly off the PTO is a no-go as the machine needs to be turning around ~3000 or so RPM for proper fan function and efficiency. The first thing I thought about doing was driving some V-belts off the PTO but with that much horsepower such a rig would be prohibitively expensive. Tire friction drive similar to what is used on some rotary cutters is a no go either as it would require some sort of idler gear as the tire contacting the belt pulley on the mill would cause it to turn in the wrong direction unless I wanted to attach the back of the tractor on the blower side. After much thought in the matter and a lot of research I think that an old Ford 8N belt pulley drive might work on my Kubota M9000 if it was mounted onto something else and connected via a PTO driveline. Here is a youtube videos showing the belt pulley in action:

With the 2N, 8N, and 9N Fords the gearbox would bolt on onto the PTO bearing housing assembly. That isn't going to happen with my tractor. But what I was thinking of doing was mounting an adapter plate on top of my hay spike and connecting it to the back of my tractor via a PTO shaft scavenged off of something else. Therein lies the second problem. Most of the 9N 760 belt pulley drives available are equipped with a 1-1/8" "proprietary" 6 spline Ford PTO shaft. Basically from what I have found out the original PTO shaft simply "floats" in the drive coupler in the belt pulley gearbox. If I were to run a PTO shaft to it then I would not only have to have some of that shaft, I'd have to figure out a way to hold it in place.

To get around that I'm thinking of building a mount similar to that of the one shown sort of wobbling on that Farmall tractor. For the shaft the cheapest way to get one is to buy a used OEM PTO shaft with bearing housing assembly and just bolt it all together to the mounting plate. Add in seal on the mounting plate and perhaps a flange mount bearing and I can have an oil bath for the PTO bearing that would normally be in the tractor. Then I could simply chop the excess shaft off and weld on an appropriate sized yoke for the working PTO shaft. In any case lots more stuff to think about.

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

 

[BHD]

I had the idea to do much the same as your doing, back when I first started to farm,

our mill said to run at 3000 rpm (if I remember correctly), I looked for a flat belt drive for the old 1950 tractor we had, could not find, I did end up finding a large flat wheel/pulley, so I mount it down by the hammer mills pulley and used a short belt to drive it, and then attached a PTO shaft to hook to the tractor.

John Deere on there 14 mill used a V pulley set up with multi belts for a drive and then off the PTO,

I some on has a Junker combine some where one may be able to use the pulley off the cylinder and it drive to make a step up drive, http://jdpc.deere.com/jdpc/JDPC/attachments.jsp?associatedPc=PC0682.pdf check out pages 4 and 14.

 

[BHD]

this thread has a good picture of another kit, Belt drive PTO conversion - Yesterday's Tractors

 

[Xfaxman]

The easiest way would be to buy an Allis Chalmers D-14 (or other tractor with a pulley) and a flat belt. :thumbsup:

 

[muddstopper]

The easiest way would be to buy an Allis Chalmers D-14 (or other tractor with a pulley) and a flat belt. :thumbsup:

Nope, the easiest way would be to sell it to me and I'll get it out of your way:thumbsup:
I bought my grandpas old mill after he passed away thinking I would set it up to grind feed. I dont know what brand it was, but it had stones instead of hammers and was wood framed instead of metal. It sat in his old barn for years unused. I went to get it a couple of years ago and the wood had rotted away. My uncle had moved it out of the barn and just left it in the weather without telling me. Parts where missing and it just wasnt worth trying to restore at that point. Anyways, My grandpa had a belt drive that attached to the pto. I think it just slipped on and was bolted to the pto shaft cover plate. Dont know what happened to it either.

 

[dixiedrifter]

Ok so I pilfered around and managed to find one of the Ford belt pulley gearboxes yesterday afternoon sitting in the bed of a junker pickup truck at my local scrap metal buyer. This particular gearbox had one of the "nice" metal pulleys on it instead of one of the commonly encountered earlier style laminated paper pulleys and a 1-3/8" female spline to male 1-1/8" spline shoved in the receiving part of the gearbox where it bolts onto the tractor. The gearbox seemed to turn freely with very little in the way of friction resistance plus all the moving parts were nice and tight with no play in them. It was getting close to dark so I decided on snagging it for $40.

Well it also just so happened that the gearbox had been sitting about halfway in standing water for some period of time along with some other steel odds and what I thought to be a mixture of a bunch of corrosion, sediment, and organic compounds like caked on grease and stuff turned out to be a welded area after getting a better look at it in the light. I'm guessing that the previous owner had tried to pull something too hard/heavy from the little miniature hitch on the rear cover plate and perhaps maybe broke or cracked a small portion of the housing in the process. Then they came along with their stick welder in a half arse attempt at welding it back together using the wrong kind of rod and very poor technique. So now the area is covered with poorly penetrated welds with a bunch of slag, corrosion, sediment, and caked on grease. While it looks really bad I don't think the main shaft inside the gearbox nor the rear bearing mounted in the back cover were disturbed so I'm hoping everything is OK on the inside. If that was not bad enough on top of everything else come to find out the outer side of the pulley has been bent out of round slightly from having something too heavy placed on it. While disappointing I think that I can get it straightened out perhaps by using one of those little portable hydraulic power pack things like body mechanics use. It won't ever be perfect again but hopefully I will be able to get it close enough to use.

So right now I have the whole thing sitting in a garbage can soaking in scalding hot degreaser. After typing the previous sentence I went an checked on it to see if any of the crap had started to come off and it appears it is indeed starting. The PTO reducer adapter which was seized tight fell right out... unfortunately revealing more bad news. The previous owner it would also appear did not have the belt pulley gearbox securely attached to the frame of his tractor causing the PTO shaft to get slightly out of alignment when running. Because of this the splines inside the gearbox have been "wallowed out" to a significant degree the further I look down into the connector inside the gearbox. In fact the more I get to looking at thing the more I get to looking at it the more I get to thinking that I bought a dud gearbox.

One shimmer of hope is that after looking at it, I think I can mount it on the rear of my Kubota tractor after all using two of the three pin holes which stabilize your drawbar and/or let it swing to either side as desired. Basically I'm thinking that if I had an upside down "T" brace made out of heavy steel plate I could just bolt it on there. Of course the catch is that to keep everything lined up properly I'd probably have to have the mounting holes for all the bolts drilled out in ovals to make sure I can get my horizontal and vertical alignments of the driveline done properly to take the strain off both my tractor's and the gearbox's bearings. Once everything is in alignment then I can weld the vertical and horizontal steel plates to make sure it is as square as possible using the PTO shaft itself as a guide and once again do a minor realignment to account for the pushing/pulling forces caused by the expanding/contracting metal during the weld.

Anyhoos lots of stuff to think about. Will try and post some pictures of the gearbox later after I get it all cleaned up.

 

[oldnslo]

I believe Farmall also made PTO to belt conversion systems for the older "H" & "M" models. Maybe able to find one of them in a tractor salvage yard.

Grinder mixers: hammer mill with tank on wheels ALL used multiple "V"-belts to drive the mill. You may find some of these in an old implement junk yard. This would give you the pulleys necessary to go from 540 to 3000 RPM.