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Do It Yourself Greasing Banks
Here's a do-it-yourself project you may want to tackle this winter in your farm workshop ù equip your larger equipment with centralized greasing banks.
"They reduce greasing time more than half," says Larry Chamness, manager of Almo Farms, Wayne City, Ill., who teamed up with shop foremen Ron Barbee and Ray Lorance to design and build greasing banks for their tractors, combines, disks and other equipment.
The trio uses 1-in. square cold rolled steel to make the mounting frame for each bank of zerks. They drill holes through the square bar, then thread them so zerks can be screwed into the front side, and compression fittings into the back side. Plastic brake line hose (about ? in. in-side dia.) is run from the bank to each zerk site. The zerk serving each greasable bearing, bushing and so forth is removed and a compression fitting screwed in for connecting to plastic hose.
"We've run individual lines 15 to 20 ft. or more without any problems. They could probably be run even longer, if necessary," Ron told FARM SHOW. He notes that the plastic hose and compression fittings are readily available from auto supply stores since they're used for brake lines.
Here's how greasing banks save valuable time during planting or harvesting, when time is money:
Almo Farms has each of two Steiger Panther 325 tractors equipped with a central greasing bank. The operator services 8 zerks in one stop. The only other greasing stop he has to make is at the U-joint. That zerk spins with the shaft and can't be tied into the "bank" system.
Almo Farm's 42-ft. disk had four grease fittings on each of 8 pillow blocks, for a total of 32 zerks to grease. The job used to take one man, working alone, 20 to 30 min. Now, thanks to 4 greasing banks mounted on the back of the disk, he does the entire job in about 5 min.
"It takes a lot of grease to load the lines initially. After that, you can service an entire bank with a hand gun," notes Ron. He suggest checking each bearing and bushing to make doubly sure it'll take grease before hooking up the plastic hose.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Almo Farms, Rt. 1, Wayne City, Ill. (ph 618 648-2286).


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1986 - Volume #10, Issue #6