Cast iron or cast steel?

Cjet

Member
What material are the clutch pulley's on a john deere A made from? I have an ear broke for the clutch dog pin that needs to be welded back on.
 
IMHO, "Cast steel" would have been a $$$ rarity in the "A" era, and Mother DEERE wouldn't have made a simple item like a "clutch pulley" out of it.

Also, likely, it wouldn't have broken, leading up to the whole premise of this thread.
 
BOB - You are exactly right. I try to correct every post on here that someone says something is Cast Steel. Years ago I worked for one of the handful of steel sand casting foundries left in this country. Most of the castings people think are cast steel are actually Ductile or Nodular iron. Our foundry made dozens of steel alloys, everything from mild steel to high strength abrasion resisting steel. Our biggest customer was CAT, then General Dynamics, then scrap metal processing equipment. It was interesting, took me a couple years but eventually I learned that lots of the smaller stuff we cast had forged equivalent parts being made.

But I agree there's a usable clutch disk somewhere in a salvage yard. Just get on the phone and find it.
 
Dr. Evil - you mentioned ductile iron.

I have several sticks of 6" waterline that we removed from a construction site. It was pretty new material and came out nice and clean. It was labeled either ductile iron or ductile steel (can't remember which), painted on the outside of the tube.

My question - can you weld this material without special rods or procedures?

Thanks
 
Never weld cast iron where human safety is involved, this incldues gray iron, ductile iron, and nodular iron. There have been large industrial personal injury settlements due to failed iron components.
 
DO NOT try and weld that piece. Get a good used one one. The odds of you getting that welded correctly and it not flying apart at engine speed is longer odds than hitting the Powerball. Just buy a good used one.

I am not doubting your skills as a welder but that is cast iron and that piece is balanced too. So you have two challenges, getting the weld to hold and the part balance when your done. Then add in the fact that it is not a rare tractor so used would be easy to find.
 
Best answer I'm gonna give about welding ductile iron pipe is, "It DEPENDS". Do a Google search and hundreds of hours of reading are available, everything from ASM and ASE and ASTM and AWS papers, to discussions on internet forums like this. If your trying to weld pipe into a pressure vessel I would say ductile iron has carbon granules in it just like gray iron that leads to cracking right next to the weld bead, so NO. If your hoping to use some of your ductile pipe to make a bench grinder stand I would probably say Yes, would work fine.
 
Thanks for your reply. No pressure vessel welding in my future.

I appreciate your hands-on knowledge about various metals.
 

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