Roll pins-cheap and unreliable?

What's your experience with roll pins? Are they cheap for the manufacturer? And do they come out sometimes? More than other fasteners?

I guess I just need to vent. I rented a Brillion SS-10 seeder from the soil and water conservation district. It worked, I got my clover and oats planted last weekend, to put some nitrogen in the soil, ahead of planned corn for next year, in North Missouri.

But, 4 things went wrong. On a fairly new unit. Have you ever had new equipment have multiple failures? Or is Brillion doing something wrong? Design issues or manufacturing problems? Since 2 pins came out and a gear slid over.

1. A roll pin came out, to drive the secondary shaft. This would turn the shaft to make clover drop, in the main boxes. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't know what to look at, so I drove over 10 acres, thinking the seed wasn't coming out very fast, kept adjusting it to get more, and it actually wasn't planting anything. Now I know what to look at, so it's easy to tell if it's dropping seeds, if the gear is turning. But it seems like this pin should not come out.



2. Another pin came out, the retaining pin to hold the bar in that works kinda like an axle, to let the wheel go down, to allow you to raise the drill. I put a bolt in the end to hold the round bar in and it worked. But I had to stop, go get my jack, jack it up, take off the tire, so I could put it in the right place to push the bar back in. You can see the pin on the other end, outside the washer.



3. This drive chain was rubbing on the roller wheel, pic below. The gear seemed to need to be slid over, to the right in this picture (gear is hard to see in this picture) there was a set screw that held it to the bar. I didn t adjust it, but wondered if it would break the chain.



4. The transport lock bent on my trip home, pulling behind my pickup. It's the black bar on both sides, holds the cylinder extended for travel. I think it s not built strong enough. This is for the wheel that is on the outside. The seeder may be 13 feet wide, so it has to ride off the pavement when I meet someone, the shoulder has lots of bumps.



5. Plus, the seeding guide was waaaay off. It said to set it at 6 to plant crimson clover at 20 pounds per acre, but I had to set it at 8, the max, to get it to drop 20 lbs per acre.



What a pain. But it worked, I think, when I wasn't having problems. Your thoughts?

This post was edited by Tree-Farmer on 10/15/2022 at 04:27 pm.

I have put Thread Lock on them and they still fall out.I now put wire through
them as a safety lock.

Roll pins are great for low stress positioning. the seeder is designed incorrectly and needs solid pins or a totally different method of positioning those components. Seems inadequately designed in several critical places. Jim

For 10 years I did the maintenance on
our soil conservation districts two
Truax no. Till grass seed drills.
It's amazing how poorly people will
treat equipment that's not their own. I
had a broken tongue on one broke the
right side transport wheel off one.
Ruin the packer wheels on the back of
the drills from pulling them with high
hitched pickups. Many times I had to do
field repairs on them and by the end of
the year they were totally junk.

This is the number one reason we
bought our own equipment and stopped
renting any,especially from the
fertlizer dealer. By the time I got
everything working as it should, we
were finished with it and it was
time to turn it back in for the next
customer to use. With the lack of
maintenance, we usually had a sloppy
job done in the field.

Mark, Long time District Supervisor in charge of flex ll drill I've done most of maintenance since retiring from ranching. Good conversation with user before hand goes a long way toward costs. Wish district had a Brillion great machine, if we had one it would be trailered. I always go over calibration with users.

I have seen roll pins used for many years in Claas combines with no problems whatsoever. They were used to hold sprockets on elevator chains and universal joints to shafts. There were even one holding the main drive pulley from the engine to the gearbox.

The thing we were always taught was the spilt goes towards the load, when the pressure comes on the split tends to widen and lock the pin tighter whereas if the load is on the side with the split 90 degrees to it, the pin will close and drop out.

In high load applications, a smaller pin can be driven into the main one to help stop it collapsing.

Many decades ago all the roll pins on my JD 227 corn picker had wires though them. The wires were painted green so it must have come from the factory that way.

Landoll Corporation bought out Brillion probably 10
years ago or so. Landoll is in Marysville, KS which is
basically my hometown, see link. I am sure they would
like your feedback on this machine. I am not sure how
new that unit is I am sure if you contacted them they
would want the model and serial number. It could be as
simple as sending an email with a short explanation
and a link to this post. It definitely looks like the
transport lock should be built a little stronger. My only
question to you would be, if the machine was your own
would have you bounced it through the bumps on the
side of the road just as severely? You have to realize
that machine has no suspension ..springs.. to take the
shock of bumps. Do you remember any extreme jolts
from the bumps as you were pulling it? If so maybe you
should go back there and see what kind of crater you
bounced it through. To add I am sure as others have
said the maintenance on a rental machine is often sub-
par.
Landoll contact info

Your comment about orienting the roll pin so that loading it tends to expand the pin is an excellent -- and much appreciated -- reminder. Thank you.