Hello all
I hve been reading this post, and it peaked my interest. As a mechanical engineer by profession, I was curious about how adding a spacer to widen your track width affects the stress on the axle and the load on the bearing. Well being the nerd that I am, I plopped myself down in Excel and banged through the calculations required to determine the axle stress and deflection of the axle vs/ spacer length. I was surpirsed to see not a a huge increase as spacer length is increased ( it definitely is not 2x per 0.5in increase in spacer length as someone earlier mentioned). I have attached an Excel spreadsheet which you can download and play with for yourself. To summarize the data:
Assuming a 6 in spacer per side (worst case)
You have a safety factor of at least 3 for torsional stress, torsional deflection, bending stress, axle deflection (sag), shear stress, and radial load on the bearing.
In the engineering world, something with a safety factor creeping up on 4 is considered "tractor engineered" no pun intended. Most tractors are way overdesigned mainly b/c weight is not a negative but a positive, and you never know what someone will try to do with a tractor.
Note:
my calculations are for static loads only and do not incorporate fatigue - this is why a safety factor is used - to account for these things.
I think you will be fine with the spacer, whenever I get a tractor I will make me some.
PS - if anyone needs spacers, I can design some in Solidworks for you and provide you with prints to take to your local machine shop (free of charge of course) or machine them for you myself.