So I screwed up some courage to take apart the sprag clutch for the slip clutch assembly. I was nervous because the dealership that I took it to was afraid that they would destroy it. I used a large punch and a small ball peen hammer to punch out the brass retainer, and it came out much easier than I thought it would. I used a pry bar to gently pull the sprag clutch out. I'd soaked it in Evapo-rust for about 20 hours, but there was still some chunks of crud on it. It's clear that sprags DO NOT like dirt. After a good scrub with a small wire brush and about a half a can of brake cleaner, I got it as clean as it was going to be. The small sprag pieces can come out of the cage pretty easily, so you have to be careful. It was apparent that the sprag had been taken apart before by marks on the back side of the brass retainer. After cleaning,I started reassembling the sprag clutch. I had a heck of a time trying to get the PTO yoke to go back in. I used a few choice words, (I stock a very large assortment of those, to fit any specific situation...) and fought with it for about an hour. I finally realized that some of the individual sprags were in backwards. They're only about an inch long, and about a quarter inch tall, but they are sort of shaped like an hourglass end to end, but the top and bottoms are NOT the same. The side that goes to the PTO yoke is eccentric on one side, and there's no marking to differentiate them. You have to look VERY CLOSELY to see the difference. So I carefully made sure that they were all aligned, and then it worked the way it should. So I'm going to clean up the slip clutch surfaces, and reassemble it.
Now let's hope everything else works the way it should.
A couple of thoughts on this design. These kind of sprag clutches are a terrible design. The small pieces wouldn't take muck corrosion or chips for them to bind up. And it seems that this assembly was designed to be protected from water somewhat by the slip clutch shield, which like a lot of shields on old equipment was gone on this baler. There's no seal to really prevent moisture from getting into this clutch, either from being left outside, (like this baler was at the dealers) or from high humidity. They should've had a better cover at least for this. Hopefully this saves me about $500. They wanted around $350 just for the sprag clutch, but I found a whole new assembly for around $450 from the UK, I'm sure shipping would be $50 or more.
It's nice to be able to fix something for once.
Now let's hope everything else works the way it should.
A couple of thoughts on this design. These kind of sprag clutches are a terrible design. The small pieces wouldn't take muck corrosion or chips for them to bind up. And it seems that this assembly was designed to be protected from water somewhat by the slip clutch shield, which like a lot of shields on old equipment was gone on this baler. There's no seal to really prevent moisture from getting into this clutch, either from being left outside, (like this baler was at the dealers) or from high humidity. They should've had a better cover at least for this. Hopefully this saves me about $500. They wanted around $350 just for the sprag clutch, but I found a whole new assembly for around $450 from the UK, I'm sure shipping would be $50 or more.
It's nice to be able to fix something for once.