Slide suspension shaft removal.

[400brian]

If you are messing with Deere sleds with slide suspension, you are very likely to run into aluminum shafts that are corroded solidly inside the steel tubes. This is a situation that a wide variety of techniques have been used to resolve.

A few procedures I am aware of:

Soaking the assemblies in penetrating oil
Drilling the shafts out.
Using an air hammer to rattle the shafts out.
Using an electrolysis process to remove the oxidation and free the shafts.
Using an Oxy /acetylene torch to melt the aluminum shafts out of the tubes.
Using muriatic acid to dissolve the aluminum shafts.
Thermal shocking the assemblies to break the bond between the tube and the shaft.

I have most recently been working on a Spitfire skid, and I found 2 shafts solidly corroded in the tubes, the longest shaft / tube, and the shortest. After heating and quenching the longest tube, I was able to move the shaft back and forth an 1/8th ". But after a couple hours of effort, I was unable to gain much more movement. A new approach seemed to be in order.

It occurred to me that none of the ideas I had heard had involved "pulling" the shaft out of the tube. I decided to see if pulling could be used effectively to remove these shafts. I looked through my stash of steel tubing, and found I had a 10" piece of thick wall chrome moly with a 3/4" ID. I also had a piece of 3/8" Redi-rod ( all thread ).

So with the arm in a vice, I threaded the rod into the shaft until it bottomed out. I added a jam nut because I could. Then I added the 10" tube, several washers, and a nut. I wound the nut up tight, then tapped the bolt I had threaded into the opposite end. Going back to the nut, I got some movement! So I did this back and forth for a bit and slowly gained a half inch. Every so often I stopped and lubed the thread on the rod, and shot a little penetrant on each end of the shaft.

I worked up a sweat, but after I gained around a couple inches things started moving a little easier. When I bottomed out my puller tube, I loosened the nut, and then used the tube as a slide hammer to extract the last few inches of the shaft.

[400brian]

Next came the short tube / shaft. This one didn't look promising at all. While the long shaft was mainly corroded on one end, and the other end would take penetrant, this one looked solidly corroded on both ends.

I thermal shocked the assembly and nothing loosened at all. This shaft is threaded 7/16", so a new Redi-rod had to be obtained. I threaded it into the shaft, added the tube, and wound the nut up tight...no movement. I heated the tube with an oxy / acetylene torch until it was smoking hot, but the shaft remained stuck.

Patience is a virtue, but this was getting old, time to go all in. I heated the tube until I was seeing the steel turn red within the flame. You need to use some discretion here, you don't want to melt the aluminum or pull the threads out. When it was as hot as I thought I dared, I quenched it a bucket of water with the puller set up still wound up tight on it. As I pulled it out, I could see the washers were now loose!

I put the arm in a vice and slowly pulled the shaft out of the tube.

[400brian]

So this technique worked as well or better than anything else I have tried, and everything was saved.

I have a Chinesium reamer that I have used, but right now I have a dingleberry hone on order to see how that works to polish the ID of tubes. The shafts can be polished up to a usable condition I think, so I all these parts will go back together again.

[400brian]

A 3/4" dingleberry hone has proven to be a quick way of cleaning up the inside of the tubes. Mc MasterCarr has them.