Plow Shares (wornout)

I have trouble keep shares on my plow, they wear out too fast. These are new from John Deere for the Brinly garden plows.
I have a 2 bottom plow, it cost $31.00 a share new and they might last me 3 plow days before needing sharpened or replaced.
What I am wondering, is there a way to harden them, or a set from a bigger plow that I could cut down and use that would last longer.
Junk in less than 10 acres of plowing.
These plows are 10" and 12" bottoms.

I came here asking this because I know somewhere on here one of you guys knows the answer, lol. Thanks for any help!

you can hard surface them with either wire rod or powdered hardsurfacing.that helps some.just make sure you do both sides of the point,or they will wear on the side that you didnt and break a chunk out.if your plowing ground that has a lot of gravel in it they dont last very long on any plow.ive worn out a many a set in one days plowing even on a regular size tractor plow.looks like your doing a good job of plowing with that little rig!i like it!

Gosh, you would think they would last longer then that. Yes I think I would buy some from a regular full size plow and take the torch and blow holes in the right place and cut it off to the right length and see how long they last.

Call,John Myer,he is a gunsmith and does metal enhansment,Ive thought about harding my lawnmower blades.Hes good to talk to 540-837-2598

jimmy

That will not work because the garden tractor size are narrower when new and the nose is also shorter, in other words they are porpotionatly smaller in all ways. And that is normal for a full size set made like that and then you get out the forge and anvile and a heavy hammer and get to work. NEVER_EVER take a grinder to them.

Leroy, I believe you are correct, because I have noticed after I grind the sled runner off the back side they seem to wear even faster...always learn something new every day....but since I don't have a forge.....this seems easiest in the field with an inverter and electric grinder....

By grinding on them I am loosing that much more material even faster, is that what you are saying?

Looks like you were at a plow day .. Where was this one ? got more pics ?

generally its not recommended to grind on one because they are whats called soft centered.they are hardened on the outside but the center is left soft to make them stronger,if you cut through the outside hardening with a grinder they wear much much faster.

If you're doing that much plowing why not use something bigger than a garden tractor? Is it hydrostatic drive and if so, does it get hot pulling that hard?

May as well try laying on so hard surface welding rod on an old pair. Not much to loose but some time and rod money.

Proportionally... I don't think the wear you're seeing is really excessive, at least not compared to what I'm used to. In our sand/rock it's not uncommon to take a set of shares off a plow in 3 days. It's also not uncommon to turn a set of tips every 4-5 hours and replace them daily...
The shares on your plow probably aren't hardened very much because they probably don't expect the plow to be out working it like you're doing...

Most shares would be heat treated or 'case hardened'. I'm not up on the specifics but it centers around bringing the part up to a certain temperature... generally below a dull red IIRC, then oil quenching. THat said... there are many procedures for heating and quenching depending on what you want to achieve.

For you... probably some hard facing rod on the leading edges would be your best bet.

Rod

I have traveled all over the USA, plowing in as many as 9 states....garden tractor plow days are real popular. Most all the tractors are hydrostatic drive and no they never get hot from pulling a plow, even in 85 degree summer temps.
Mine is diesel and water cooled.
I checked on some hard surfacing wire for a mig and it is almost prohibitively expensive, too much so for experimenting. These ahares are soft enough I can cut them in half with my handheld bandsaw.
Its not unusual for up to 50 garden tractors to show up at a well planned plow day.

Looks like he was at a plow day or just having fun.
there several around if you Google them. this one was in Iowa I believe they wanted a mile of garden tractors this was a pass in the air.

Yes you loose half the share each time you grind on them. Better is take a welder and build back up what is worn off and then you can use a grinder to reshape your welding but do not go into the orignal share.

You really do not need hard surface wire, check at your welding store for hard face that you can machine. not all that expensive but a lot harder than your share.

If you can cut them with a band saw they are not really hard at all.

Try heating your next set with a rosebud then water quenching them. This should get you a little more wear. If I remember correctly you waer quench, unless you have a good high alloy steel, then you would oil quench. Sorry its been 20 years since I had to think about this.

Maybe a metalurgist can answer better. But I bet at least water quenching will get you more life out of them.

Rick

You can hard face with a common powder spray torch . The Rockwell wood be about 50. Where do you live? Are your moldboards holding up OK. email is open. Earl

Sorry, WOULD be.

I used to hard surface my 16 inch shares all the time. I would do a new set before I ever used them. I would put a bead on the bottom side all the way and more under the point. Then I also put some over the point to keep that from wearing away. I made a jig or call it a clamp to put on it while doing it it to put pressure on it to keep it from warping so bad that it wouldn't fit. The weld would pull the ends down otherwise.

Water quenching will harden them but also make them brittle. Unless he's plowing clean ground, brittle is probably not a good feature.
Not saying it's not worth a try... but mabey a starting point to do some basic research on case hardening and tempering.


Rod

Maybe you can have them Nitrided...

That would wear well..

Or, have them heat-treated..

Ron..

Try the hard surface rod. A little goes a long way.

Sorry, but my first impression when I saw your picture was "funny farm". LOL

Have you ever thought about having 500 green tractors traveling to the Washington Mall and ripping up all that crab grass and weeds? Get JD to pay your expenses as a promotional event. It would make all the evening newscasts.

My Great Grand fathers where black smiths. We always used a product called "Stodite" to hard surface plow points. You just heated the point with the forge or a torch until it was cherry red and applied the Stodite like a brazing rod to the surface.

What I use now for loader bucket wear surfaces is a welding rod called "Alcam #93". If you have a welding supply house they should have them on hand. They are a stick welding type of rod. You should be able to buy just a pound or two. You don't need a whole roll of Mig wire laying around.

If you have an old shear laying around you could also build it back up with 10018 welding rod too. They would be harder than the soft steel your seem to be made out of. Then heat the leading edge up until it is cherry red and oil cool it. Just have a steel hog pan full of motor oil and dip the shear in and out of it until cool. Oil cooled will be hard but not brittle like water cooled would be.

heres the trick on hardening one,do not heat one cherry red,when you do its hot clear through,if you are going to work it,just heat it to a dull red(you have to have a dark place for this,you cant tell outside in the sun generally)heat it until its just dull red and quickly quench it by SLOWLY laying it FLAT with the whole bottom of share down in a pan of water.if you dip it point first you will draw the heat to point and it will harden but not the rest.you need to resurface harden the whole share.just slowly dip it in water the same way it sits on plow.and then drop it in to cool.heres basically what happens,when you heat one and temper it you align all the molecules in the steel one drection.this leaves it very hard and resistant to wear but its also brittle because the molecules are laying side by side and they are not interlocked like a piece of fiberglass or something.this makes it easy to break along this line and it will snap right off.by leaveing the center of your share soft you greatly increase the breaking strength of steel simply because those molecules are interwoven with each other.by just heating the share to a dull red,where the center is cooler, you can achieve the best of both.does that make sense? the REASON you quench the share in water by laying it flat is that you align the molecules in that diretion.this makes soil and things slide off easier ,but it it also makes it wear longer.and because the piece is longer that direction its naturally stronger.if you dip JUST the point,you align the molecules along that line and point is prone to snap right down that line simply because its narrower there.its like bending a piece of baling wire and a 2 ft wide steel plate , plate its simply stronger because of its mass. by aligning molecules down the length of share you take advantage of its mass.all this sounds hard but its really not if you have a way of heating the whole share evenly.torch wont do it usually because its too uneven heat,and it takes a fairly large furnace to get a whole share in. if it were myself,i would try to contact one of the amish folks, or one of their splinter groups.they could most likely tell you of a blacksmith in your area that still does this.if you could actually get a few folks in your club to go along with you you may get it done fairly cheaply.BUT,let me tell you,just between freinds,$31 is CHEAP for a share these days i would buy a bunch for my plow at that price.i doubt ( i honestly dont know) that a blacksmith would rebuild one any cheaper.they would have to be close to you or the shipping alone would be over that these days.any way thats the theory behind it.practice?well your sort of on your own there.LOL

Jack,
Good detail. That helped clean the cobwebs out of my brain, from not thinking of this stuff for 20 years.

The one thing that still sticks in my mind on these shares, the original poster said he can cut them with a band saw, you really are not starting out with a base steel that is all that hard to begin with.

You can only harden and align molecules so much depending on the base material you start with.

Am I correct?

Rick

yes thats true ,hence the different alloys.but heres the rub ,you would be hard pressed to find a harsher environment for a hunk of steel than a plow share,especially a high speed share.they have to not only be able to withstand constant wear,but also constant impact,and at the same time remain affordable.you could of course make a share out of one of the super alloys they have these days that would stand up better to the abuse,but it would quickly become cost prohibitive.in other words if you could buy that whole plow new for $300,wheres the cost effectiveness in building a share for that plow for that costs $350?folks would simply buy a new plow.kind of a trade off thing.thats one of the drawbacks to using a moldboard plow,even though its fairly simple,its not cheap and it never was to operate.consider this,with that setup he has,and im not belittling it by any means, looks to me as if its doing a excellent job,how many MILES does he have to travel to plow 10 acres?that is quite honestly a lot of miles with a 10" plow.when you figure the time it takes,thats a LOT of time on that plow point in a extremely abrasive environment.if of course you were simply plowing a 25x50 ft garden space you would think you were getting better service,simply because your share would last several years.but in reality it averages out about the same if you consider the miles its been used.10 acres doesnt seem like a lot,but using his rig it is probably equal,to fifty or sixty acres or more on a full size tractor that can run faster and pull 3 or 4 14-16" bottoms. simply because of the time they are in the ground and the distance they travel.they narrower the bottom,and the less bottoms you have the more miles you have to travel to plow a certain space,thats why its possible to run a tractor that uses 5 times the fuel,that pulls 5 times the bottoms more effeciently that you can one using less fuel and less bottoms.if you simply cover more ground, faster, with less miles driven, =savings not only in time, but wear and upkeep on equipment,and fuel savings because your running less hours.

Back in the day, my grandfather would weld pieces of leaf spring from the junkyard on plow shares to extend their life. Leaf spring is pretty darned hard steel.

I've got a Little Genius plow from my uncle that has leaf springs welded on the shares. Plows pretty good, so I'm told.

heres a example ,pretty simplisticly.say i use his rig with a 12" plow,right beside it is a tractor burning twice the fuel with 2-12"lets compare,
1-fuel effeciency,tractor one burns one gal per hour,tractor 2 ,2 gals.tractor 1 plowing a feild 100' wide will make 100 passes,tractor 2 -50.at the exact same speed which tractor is more effecient?two of course its ran half the time did twice the work on the same amount of fuel as 1
2- tractor wear,again all things being equal tractor 2 is the winner hands down simply because its ran half as long under a load.
3- plow wear- heres where it really gets interesting,tractor 2s two bottom plow has did the same amount of work as ones with (A) half the time in the ground as number 1s this means wear on share due to time at a certain wear factor is wear x time = 1/2,in the same exact ground the one bottom plow will WEAR twice as fast as two per bottom.this means simply that if hes plowing 10 acres between share changes we should plow twenty in the same ground with the two bottom.(b) now not only was the two bottom plow in the ground half as long it also traveled on each share half the distance.again same share and ground, since wear was cut by half due to time,it was also cut by half due to distance .again same wear factor, our two bottom plow should last not twice as long,but 2 times due to time X 2 times due to distance =4 times the acres which in this case would =40 acres,so plow 1 for every 10 acres would have the same amount of wear as plow 2 would have if we plowed 40 acres! simply by adding ONE bottom! nothing else.when you start figuring it up this way he may not be getting bad service at all.lets see,
if we know hes getting ten acres to the share lets extend it out to our plows and check.
2- bottoms 40 acres (2x2x10)
3- bottoms 90 acres (3x3x10)
4- bottoms 160 acres(4x4x10)
5- bottoms 250 acres(5x5x10)
in my experience thats probably not bad service especially if his ground is pretty abrasive.

Here's a cute one the owner reworked that was at a recent local plow day.

Most Conventional (Blacksmith) Shares & moldboards are 1080 carbon steel, heat treated. Most of the throw away shares other than the Rock Shares are grader blade material.

I also don't think your wear rate is unreasonable. Especially if you are plowing dry heavy ground or gravelly ground. I would venture to guess the shares you are buying aren't of the quality that shares would have been years ago.

I don't see anything wrong with grinding the sled runner off a share. You have to do something, and welding on it is just messing up the cutting edge. You'll never get a nice cutting edge without a sledrunner if you are welding on a new or a used share.

My grandpa did it, and lo and behold, it works for me also. The procedure went: plow until the sled runner pushes the plow out of the ground, grind off the sled runner. Repeat until there is no suck left or there is way too much to grind off. Then it was time for a trip to the blacksmith to heat up the point and draw it out. I just heat up the point with a torch and tap the point down just a tad, clean up it with the grinder and you're back in business. Continue plowing and repeat the grinding process. Once the share was worn to a nub it was time to go back to the blacksmith to do a complete rebuild.

Grandpa would have three sets of shares for his plow. One set on the plow, one new or sharp used set in the tool shop, and a third set at the blacksmith being worked on.

I have a once-new set of shares from Crescent Forge that I wore to the point of having zero suck in probably less than 15 acres. I then heated and tapped down the point and I am still using them.