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Rebuilt Bogie Wheels "Outlast Original Equipment"
Replacing worn-out rubber on a bogie wheel with cast urethane makes the wheels last longer and costs half the price of a new one. Cast urethane can be formulated as hard or as soft as needed, says John Green, Jr. at Green Rubber-Kennedy Ag. He says they’ve found a formulation that works for the idler wheels on major brand track tractors.
  “We’ve been doing them for about 10 years, and they hold up better than the originals,” he says. “Some of our early customers were skeptical, but they are still running those first rebuilds years later. They have saved countless dollars.”
  The savings are substantial. Rebuilds with urethane run $310 to $368, depending on wheel style. New replacements can run twice that.
  Green says rebuilding the bogie wheels was a natural move for the parts distribution company. Among the services they offer are high-speed vulcanizing, fabrication and custom urethane casting.
  “We’ve been in the urethane casting business for about 23 years,” he says. “We do custom rollers, sprockets and more. We would see piles of worn out bogie wheels at customers’ farms. They would scrap them out or just dump them.”
  The company discovered they could strip away the old rubber and sandblast the metal to a shine, cast the urethane and send them back as good as new. Green says the material is extremely versatile, abrasion resistant and crack-resistant.
  “We’ve made replacement paddles for mechanical grape harvesters,” he says. “The originals are made from acrylic, are brittle and shatter. Ours are rigid, but you can bend a piece of urethane, and it will flex back.”
  Green says they have made wiper blades, mounting brackets, all sorts of rubber and plastic replacement items out of urethane.
  “If you have something with rubber that is wearing out, give us a call,” says Green. “We may have a solution.”
  Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Green Rubber-Kennedy Ag, 1310 Dayton St., Salinas, Calif. 93901 (ph 831 753-6100 or 800 273-2464; sales@greenrubber.com; www.greenrubber.com).


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2013 - Volume #37, Issue #4