BR Flexitor and CrankArm

[midwestsnopro]

Fighting a battle of loose crankarms on the flexitors causing the splines to break and excessive wear on the shafts. Yearly service includes taking all arms off and reapplying loctite and retorque of the hardware, however, still seem to have the problem. I am thinking of actually teardown mid-season to try and prevent. Yearly hours are 800-1000 on the machines.

Anyone have any suggestions to help prevent loosening?

Anyone tried any repairs to get more life out of worn splines? (any miracle weld)

Tired of shelling out the bucks on 3 or 4 sets a year to keep the suspensions riding right. We have 4 br's in our fleet.

[nhmx271]

What are you using for loc-tite(green-680/690) and what torque spec(250 lbs)?

[midwestsnopro]

hey nhmx271- is this alias for "evil pete".

using 690 loctite and torqued to spec., seems like when taking apart if there is any wear or broken splines, it's not going to make it to much longer and won't tighten-up. I also only replace the flex and crank arm in pairs so that I don't put bad splines on new splines(making it quite expensive).

[nhmx271]

evil pete,who's your daddy?, etc-lol-yeah it's him. Once the splines are gone, there is no hope for them and you end up buying both. Considering the cost I tell the customer to try the fix but most likely he will be just prolonging the inevitable $$$$ If I am doing the work the customer has no choice but to spend the $$$$. Another thing I do is replace the bolt, washer and nut as you can get a false torque reading from worn/streched hardware/bad threads, etc-it does make a difference. A good torque wrench is critical-a 400lb'er and expect to pay a buck a lb.

[johnny wrench]

midwestsnopro,had this problem when we first got these cats in 93' and quickly discovered to apply some heat to crank arm before pulling(permatex says 300 degrees) to ''unfix'' the 680 as their tech support people said product can tear the splines out due to the friction created when pulling arm off if not unfixed ,also spread the ear of the crank arm alittle with a wedge to assist pulling it off,and make sure to get all of old product off before applying new 680. I found a dental pick and a small wire brush works well to get into the root of the splines. using this proceedure we've virtually eliminated this problem. hope this helps!