PTO slip clutch

Lets start with I am not easy on a brush cutter.
I feel if the tractor can bend the tree over it ought to be small enough for a brush cutter to eat it.
So I replace more than my share of shear bolts.
I am using a Howse 5 foot cutter that has a cutting capacity of up to 1 1/2 inches per the manufacture with a 55hp gear box.

Rather than get off my butt and cut these trees down with a saw I am looking at installing a pto clutch and doing away with the shear bolt.
We are not talking about cutting a grove of trees.
More like might come across 3 or 4 trees per acre.

I assume you just install them with grade 8 bolts and cut the drive shaft to fit the shorter length.

Then I went to find one and found a big price differance in different brands.


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https://www.agrisupply.com/gr-1-pto-slip-clutch-smooth/p/90653/


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https://www.agrisupply.com/pto-slip-clutch/p/32323/


With the second one costing almost 3 times as much there has to be a differance but for the life of me I can not find much of a differance in the discription.
So school me on these PTO clutches.
 
Much of the difference may be in the friction materials and service life. I will suggest that which ever you buy, that you back off the adjustment alnd slip it before you use it tighter. They can take a friction lock, and not slip as they should if not turned some when new. Jim
 
I have wondered about that too, I bought one from a driveline repair shop 15 years ago and paid about $90. I see the cheaper one has a snap ring groove in the end of the shaft, I had to put one in the one I bought. That is to keep the shaft from flying off if you shear the bolt that holds the yolk on. I would go with the cheaper one, but research it first.
 
Could be the quality of the shaft metal itself.I bought a cheapie PTO adapter to get some more length on the shaft at the tractor broke into two pieces in less than half a day of bush hogging.
 
If you find a ops manual on a mower equipped with one it will tell you to always backoff the tension block the blades so they cant turn and slip it till you just see a bit of smoke,, 3-10 seconds normally does it depending on how tight you leave the adjustment,, then tighten adjusting nuts Evenly and test run for 3 min or so cutting,, if the hub is Hot or warm from slipping tighten each nut 1/4 turn until it quits heating,, this will give you "slip" with out smoking the disc's this needs to be done at least once a season if you have a lot of rain when it sits it may be needed more often,, I ran a 10' Bush Hog brand mower for years at the local ZCounty cutting 1500 miles of road ditches a year,, in all that time I broke one gear box output shaft,, and that was right out of the box using the mower int he spring after another guy had ran it the year before and he had tightened the clutch solid,, I never even hit anything before it broke you could see it was 3/4 broken when parked,, all it took to save gearbox parts was to do this simple adjustment/maintenance and all was good,,
cnt
 
They will. Inside or outside.

After a few years, a slip clutch that is not properly adjusted (few are) and/or is not loosened and slipped yearly will freeze, resulting in no protection for gearbox or tractor.

Dean
 
I shy away from them at every opportunity. A shear bolt is foolproof.

A slip clutch has many skeletons in the closet! Question for me is, which one is going to jump out and bite me......and it has happened on a popular brand 8' twin rotor shredder, JD 4020 driver. Got to where anytime I had one it was barn stored and I backed off the springs every spring before using and ran it so it would deliberately slip.....in heavy grass. Then tightened the springs somewhat and did it some more. Finally set the spring length at the designed length (by how far the nut is down on the retaining bolt). Sometimes additional tweaking was required if discs were worn, like on an old mower....that setting wouldn't keep the blade from slipping in heavy grass.

Course whacking a tree could be a one whack or multiple....on one whack a loose one could cut and reset....might, might not.
 

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