I have two sets of tracks for my HG. The first has the bottoms worn down and a previous owner bolted angle iron onto the plates instead of building up welds to increase the grouser plate ridges. The second set of tracks I have have nice ridges, but the castings around the pins are worn through on most, if not all the pin locations. My question is, can the grouser plates be removed from all the tracks and then have the good plates re-installed on the good tracks with the good castings/sleeves? Is a track machine required for this? Any ideas of the cost involved?
I called Lanis Zimmerman today and got some prices and direction. It looks like I'll be building up my tracks with the bad grouser plates with weld rod through next winter and maybe take the second set with bad bushings into Zimmerman's for new pins and sleeves for a spare set (or future swap out).
Get some bar stock of suitable dimensions and weld to the grousers to build them up, rather than just building them up with weld. You can actually buy grouser bar with the proper tapers and bevels to make it easy, but that stuff is quite expensive.
Thanks Blake! Looks like I'll be getting lots of welding practice on this during the next set of winter months! The bar stock use makes sense. Thanks for all the advice!
I need to do the same thing to my OC-12. It has new tracks, but it has loader pads, which don't have enough bite in mud. I'm gonna weld a bar on the lead grouser on each pad.
Blake