Creep Lever Cotter Pin?

[mmranch]

My creep lever developed a problem a while back... and I never looked into the problem as I rarely use the creep speeds. But basically the lever comes up through a hole the cab floor and the lever had become loose and rattled around. It worked... you just pull up on the lever to get slow speeds and push it down to return to normal speeds.

But today I went to fix the problem. The lever rod is passed through a rubber grommet which is supposed to be mounted into the floor hole. The rubber grommet had become loose and was way up on the rod.

The reason it had come loose is that there is a cotter pin in a hole in the rod just below the floor. When the rubber grommet is properly installed in the floor, the cotter pin sits about a 1/4 of an inch below the grommet (1/2 inch below the floor). If you pull up on the lever, the cotter pin comes into contact with the rubber grommet almost immediately. So when I had pulled on the lever, the cotter pin pushed the rubber grommet out of its hole. The cotter pin was all distorted from being pulled through the floor hole and catching on the hole.



This design is totally illogical. When you pull on the creep lever, the range that it seems to move is about 2-3 inches to go from OFF to ON. This puts the cotter pin hole traveling through the floor hole (and the grommet zone). When you push the lever down... the cotter pin hole returns to 1/2 below the floor.

I just re-installed the rubber grommet in the floor and removed the cotter pin completely. Now, pull up or push down and the lever turns the creep ON or OFF without disturbing the grommet.

Seems like this cotter pin would be some kind of lockout to keep the creep from working? The manufacturer could not have intended the cotter pin to be ripped through the hole at each usage could they? Do others have a cotter pin on their tractors creep levers like this?

Thanks for any ideas!

 

[hosspuller]

Any chance the linkage has been moved so the pin travels below the floor? Possibly the pin is supposed to stay above the floor supporting the linkage.

 

[mmranch]

Thanks for the ideas!

That service manual drawing shows the cotter pin below the floor and below the rubber floor grommet. And the rubber grommet was above the cotter pin (as in the drawing), so I think it's meant to be that way. (Plus, I dont think the cotter pin could have been moved through the rubber grommet hole without tearing it up).

All I can figure is that it is intended to lock out the creep lever from being engaged (for some reason... shipping the tractor maybe?) and the cotter pin was never removed for tractor use. (It's kind of a poor design for that as well as it needs to have a big washer between the grommet and cotter pin to really keep the cotter pin from ripping out the grommet when the lever tries to move upward).

(One thing I have found in the past is that you can somehow get that creep lever into a dangerous 'neutral' position of some kind where if it's not all the way OFF (down) or ON (up) the tractor can go into neutral and start running away downhill. My property is very steep so when this happens, the tractor can get moving very fast and you have to get on the brakes quickly to stop it. I then look down and the lever has moved into the middle. I push it back down to OFF and the tractor operates normally again).

Thanks again.

 

[mmranch]

You know I wonder... maybe they want a lump on the rod at the cotter pin point so that the rod will not drift upward into this dangerous neutral postion? If that were the case, the force of the operator pulling up would intend to pull the rod lump up through the grommet hole to the top side when turning ON. Then when turning OFF the rod lump would return to below the grommet.

If so, the cotter pin is a very poor method of implementing the lump on the rod as it can't possible pass through the rubber grommet hole.

Weird.