Final Drive questions - Not a gear/hydro thing

[slowzuki]

Another few notes, helical refers to the teeth being angled, not whether a spur or planetary design is used.

A planetary drive needs largish tires to have much ground clearance at the rear of the machine.

Most ag tractors are already too tall to even consider spur setups.

Planetarys are more sensitive to dirt and contaminents in the oil due to their more complicated design.

Either style designed correctly will provide great service. Spurs get a bad name from early crawler tractors (IH's in particular) in which some packaging issues prevented a good design.

 

[_RaT_]

I asked the Kubota dealer/mechanic about this. My first Kubota had planatary and the second has spur. The gear and spur are considerably bigger then the planatary set but then, it needs to be. In the end, the mechanic mentioned they never have issues with either drive, both are very long lasting. If a spur type gear did not have long lasting properties, then I suspect most planetary tractors using gear transmissions would also be subject to premature failure since most transmissions also use single point loading designs.