Hi, I'm new to the forum because I just sold my very old Mustang skid steer that was very easy to fix and bought a 2001 ASV HD4500. The machine has 1600 hours, original tracks that need replacing, and it has a few bogie wheel leaks and one planetary leak. I haven't done the job yet but it sure looks like this machine will be easy to work on. I've also got a JD dozer that I've done a complete undercarriage rebuild on. The ASV looks simple compared to that dozer. Does anyone have any experience or advice regarding how hard it is to fix the planetary leak. It appears to be leaking where the input shaft goes into the planetary. I assume I'll have to detach the drive motor and remove the planetary to replace the input shaft seal. Any thoughts? It looks like track removal will be very easy. It also looks like the whole undercarriage will be very easy to take apart. Am I being overly optimistic? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
I recently got some good advice from someone on another forum on how best to deal with my wheel axle leaks. I think this solution is so good that I wanted to provide it here for anyone else who might need it. Currently the ASV axles are oil filled with shaft seals just outside of the bearings. I found someone who has fixed the seal leaks without replacing the seals. The solution is to drain the oil and take the seals out. Fill the bearing and the axle tube with grease, pack the space between the seal and bearing with grease and put the old seal back in. The guy who told me about this says he's got 200 hours on this type of fix with no problems yet. In the case where a bearing is bad he suggests replacing the bearing with a sealed bearing only remove the seal in the inside if the bearing so the grease in the axle tube has access to the bearing. Then seal the unit up with more grease between the new bearing and the old seal. This effectively gives you a double seal on the bearing. This sounds like a brilliant fix to a chronic problem and it sounds to me like it might last longer than the original design. I'm going to try it on my machine and see how it works.