You know, this is like a disease. You buy one of these old girls to do work around the property, farm,etc., and you end up working it over because you cannot stand to see stuff in this shape.... Well, thats me anyway.... The swing pedals on my 580B were worn out and sloppy, they would stick at times causing real issues as you can imagine. :Banghead So here is what I did about them, I hope this idea helps others. Here is one of the pedals removed showing 30+ years of wear on basically what is a shaft that is supported by a piece of bent strap metal. The strap has worn grooves in the pedal shaft on both sides, on the top of one side and bottom of the other. This wear and the wear on the pins and yokes of the rods all stacked up to be a inch or more of slop up and down and side on the pedals. It took liberal use of the blue wrench to get these apart, due to the rust. So I MIG welded the groves in the shafts full and then ground them down. I would have like to have a lathe like GWS to make this prettier, but this worked. I also welded the strap holes and ground them out to fit with a die grinder and round stone. Continued....
Then I found some 3/4" steel bushings in the hardware section and Lowes, they were a tad long so they were cut in half leaving a 1" collar for each end. I fit them on the shaft and welded inside of each end of the strap mount to give a better bearing surface for the shafts. Also fitted each with a 1/4"-28 grease fitting to get some lube in there. With new clevis pins and some work on the rod yokes everything is nice, tight and smooth as a baby's rear now.... This should last longer than I am going to use this machine! I should have cleaned them up and threw some Power Tan on them while they were apart, but it was 12' F outside and about 40' in my shop. Too cold to be painting.... Dave
Nice improvement! I need to do this to my 580c. Mine are worn a bit also.
I'll be showing this to my ultra-retentive welding buddy....I'll be sporting sleeved pedal rods with the grease fittings in no time! Great idea!