Countershaft 3rd gear for H

Used 3rd gears ( 56417D) for an early H are hard to come by. I use 3rd gear a lot and I'm not interested in replacing this part twice.

Has anyone purchased an aftermarket gear ? If so, what did you think of the part ( workmanship, pits in the casting, etc.) ?

Does anyone know if the gear sold by CIH is any different than the gears sold by everyone else ? CIH is always pretty proud of their stuff, they want $30 more than any other source. What are the chances that there are two outfits making these gears ?

Thanks
Greg

Okay first I have no personal experience to judge the quality of the aftermarket gears so you can choose to ignore my reply if you wish. What are you using your H for when it is in 3rd gear? Do you plow and disk 50 acres or more yearly strictly using 3rd gear? Or do you do some other hard pull in 3rd say for 40 - 60 hours a year? If not I do not think you will have a problem with a replacement gear. If those aftermarket gears were not very reliable I think you would see more posts on here to warn others. By the way those gears are not cast. If you see a rough area in the outside of them that is the outer surface of the forged chunk it was made from that did not get machined. A forged part is pounded or pressed to an initial shape while hot. The only cast part in the drive train of an H that transmits power is the hub that the bull gear rivets onto.

I have heard of some shops making replacement gears for older IH tractors by machining gears from slices of bar stock. With today's machining technology cutting the slice off a bar only takes seconds, boring and facing, and turning OD would give a blank ready to broach splines into and hob gear teeth. A Forged blank that IH Louisville made probably has better mechanical properties that a piece of bar.
Mitsubishi makes wire EDM, electric discharge machines that a thin copper wire shoots sparks to cut intricate shapes in steel, heat treat is not effected, surface finish is good enough for gear teeth to run against each other. Lots of tool & die shops have these machines. Also there's companies that make custom gears, it helps if you have a print, a gear shop may have some H prints already. Gears are really tight tolerance parts, IH had a gear lab, white room conditions, air conditioned and heated, controlled access, a couple of every batch of gears off every machine set-up were inspected and approved before more than 2-3 were made.
IH did a lot of little secondary machining operations on their gears that I really wonder if today's gear makers would do, like rounding the leading edges of the engaging surfaces of transmission gears.
I was a production scheduler in a gear production department at FARMALL for a year in 1977.
I'm sure there's an H in a salvage yard with a pair of good matching 3rd speed gears. I'd replace them as a pair.