Vintage Windmill and Wind Generator Forum

Sears also made a house kit to go beside your windmill.I understand each board was numbered and had Sears and Roebuck on it.

crank gear short shaft, eccentric bearing, broken gear, and Timken nose bearing pics

If you use a shaft without a larger center, can you use a brass bearing with it?

windybob wrote: Mon Oct 12, 2020 6:34 am If you use a shaft without a larger center, can you use a brass bearing with it?

The short shaft is in pretty good condition, not worn (the dark marked is solidified oil) should clean up nicely. I think a quality repair job would be to bore and press in sleeve the eccentric plain bearing insert, and move on.
edit: I cleaned it up and measured it with my dial calipers, the short shaft has .03" taper, the plain bearing insert is pretty worn, but if I make a new shaft, I can just bore the essentric bearing to suit the oversize shaft.

My biggest issue right now is getting the main shaft out.

Since there's no opening at the rear of the case for the main shaft to pass, I think the main shaft come out the nose end. I also think both pinion gears need to come off the shaft during removal. They are pinned to the shaft, I've seen where you've mentioned these are tapered pins, which looks/feels right with respect to mine.

As luck would have it, hose tapered steel pins happen to be 'large end exposed' when viewed in the pictures, and accessible with a punch and hammer. In order to knock them out, I need to rotated the shaft 180deg, aaaaaaand of course the shaft is still frozen. I screwed the hub and locknut back in place, welded a better couple tabs on my 8ft cheater bar, and tried to free the shaft again. No joy.

At 8 o'clock last night, I tapped the pinion gears with a big brass punch and 3lb hammer, trying to free things up and broke a tooth off one of the pinion gears. I should have known better, eff'ing brittle cast iron gears, impatient hamfisted mechanic, take your pick

Dang! Hate that when it happens. Been there done that!

The pins on mine did NOT go all the way thru, but stopped short of coming out the other side, but I drilled them thru anyway.

The snout bearing (Timken) on Dempsters gets stuck a lot. I take care of them with the "heat wrench".

I still think you will need to cut your mainshaft in a few places to get the rest of it out.

pcowley wrote: Sun Oct 11, 2020 9:49 am Sears also made a house kit to go beside your windmill.I understand each board was numbered and had Sears and Roebuck on it.

I used to love going through old Sears Roebuck catalogs. Talk about being 'vertically integrated', sell 'em the dishes pots and pans, furniture, clothes, shoes. Windmill. They partnered with the manufacturers, who put the Sears name on things, but specialized in point of sale only. The original big box store.

Pretty interesting that you could order a house kit. With rail then local freight company being the best option until maybe the 1960's, shipping costs must have been really high.

All you needed was the money, which by most accounts, settlers that headed west to start a homestead/ranch/farm, found in short supply.

TomsWaterPumper wrote: Mon Oct 12, 2020 8:27 am I used to love going through old Sears Roebuck catalogs. Talk about being 'vertically integrated', sell 'em the dishes pots and pans, furniture, clothes, shoes. Windmill. They partnered with the manufacturers, who put the Sears name on things, but specialized in point of sale only. The original big box store.

Original Big Box Store ... maybe. But I would liken the mail order business to the original Amazon.

windybob wrote: Mon Oct 12, 2020 8:23 am The pins on mine did NOT go all the way thru, but stopped short of coming out the other side, but I drilled them thru anyway.

Mine are thru, as they should be.

On a side note, blind pins are stupid (engineering), unless it's by design and the engineer didn't want anyone but a machine shop to ever take it apart. Which is ridiculous.

I'll get my neighbor over to help me man-handle this thing, and heat up the nose and pinion gear bearing saddles. I have a pretty large rosebud tip for my torch, should be able to induce some freedom and 180deg shaft rotation.

Failing that, rather than trying to drill out these pins, my plan B is to drill access holes thru the case from the underside, and drive them out. I can plug the holes later, by tapping the case for 3/8-NPT and use pipe plugs, so the oil doesn't run out. What do you think about that?

Eating the elephant one bite at a time.

There's no repairing the broken pinion tooth... and I'm not very optimistic about reparing the broken crank gear.

Not saying I would, but I have made spur and helical gear sets in college machine shop, like 40yrs ago .

As part of my manufacturing engineerday job, I have a fabrication job in work right now, at a place that also has a gear making business they also own. They support the power generation, ship repair and other industries. I'm sure for $7500 they'd make both for me out of 8620 or 9310 gear steel

Now that I'm joking about it, maybe I can source some suitable gear blanks. I'll need to look at that. Speaking of work, I better hit the road

Put an ad on here for some 10 ft pinions. Someone out the HAS to have 10 ft pinions for a MOD M Stover.

Drilling the case is ok. You could weld them shut also. It's not like you're going to be using the accesses any time soon.