Toro kit for power steering on a 520h

[Damien Walker 246]

10 hours ago, ebinmaine said:

First things first. I want to say thank you for your effort and time putting these posts together. 

Whether I use any of these methods or not I'm really enjoying the information.  

Hi Eric...I've spent so.many years just lurking and not contributing that it is about time I did! I suffer from the heavy steering problem and decided to try to do something about it. I'm a little wordy perhaps but it's amazing how much there is in problems like this when you start to discuss them.

 

 

[Damien Walker 246]

10 hours ago, ebinmaine said:

First things first. I want to say thank you for your effort and time putting these posts together. 

Whether I use any of these methods or not I'm really enjoying the information.  

Hi Eric...I've spent so many years just lurking and not contributing that it is about time I did! I suffer from the heavy steering problem and decided to try to do something about it. I'm a little wordy perhaps but it's amazing how much there is in problems like this when you start to discuss them. Basically it's nice I've found something I feel I can add something to.

 

I agree, the absolute position of the wheel probably doesn't matter but it makes sense to try to keep it in the same position.

 

My problem with turns ratio stems from WH getting it about right...their steering is delightfully direct with an almost direct connection ...it's more like a bicycle as there is so little gearing as such....and the heavy steering stems from this fact. When I fitted power steering, it increased the turns ratio and whilst there was no effort involved, it was quite an effort to spin the wheel fast enough to avoid banging into things. I think the WH turns ratio is about right so we really only want to address the heaviness. Obviously with a geared solution, you can't achieve both so a compromise is required. 4:1 would be terrible unless your machine was very slow and not used for mowing I think. I'm concerned about your suggestion to use two quickeners...'one horizontal'...would that be in the main horizontal flag gear shaft? If you fitted a quickener there, yes it would reduce your steering effort but it would also halve the amount of steering travel ....which would not be a good idea!

 

As for the spline adaptor...yes, being GM, even over here, there must be tons of stuff available..in scrap yards if nowhere else!

 

Best of luck with Colossus...I'll try to keep a watch on your progress..it will be interesting to see how it develops.

[ebinmaine 67,549]

3 hours ago, Damien Walker said:

I'm concerned about your suggestion to use two quickeners...'one horizontal'...would that be in the main horizontal flag gear shaft? If you fitted a quickener there, yes it would reduce your steering effort but it would also halve the amount of steering travel ....which would not be a good idea!

 

 

That one would be fine. Reason being is I am REMOVING the Wheel Horse gears.

I need to put something more heavy duty and with as close to zero lash as I can.

 

I don't know what the actual factory gear ratio is for these tractors.

Somebody in the build thread mentioned that the fan to flag horizontal shaft rotates around a quarter turn so obviously that's what my steering wheel would also do if I just installed two or three u-joints to make the angle.

 

That wouldn't necessarily be completely unmanageable given the exercise of the steering wheel and the fact that I'm going to be running tri-rib tires with much higher than stock air pressure.

Still, I'd like to have some sort of division to the steering gears.

@Oldskool Mike showed me a link for something that would be used for an ice auger which is around 3.8, 4 to 1. That might work perfectly fine for my situation given consideration that I'm building the tractor one system at a time and I'm not trying to restrict myself to a given size or shape, within reason.

 

 

 

[Damien Walker 246]

All very interesting!

 

Removing WH's system would certainly give you more scope. My hydraulic conversion does the same in fact and the good thing is that the arguably difficult linkage is done with hoses which you can route anywhere.

 

I have considered a steering rack type system but finding one so narrow could be tricky. It might be possible to shorten one from something such as a VW Golf or a Smart 4-2. If you shorten the rack and the casing whilst aligning the input shaft to where the original horizontal flag shaft was, you could then connect that to the column via your fleet of ujs....steering effort must be much less than in the Golf due to the lack of weight.

 

I'm not sure whether mentioning a make of yellow tractors here is wise but some Club Cadets (ooer sorry folks!!!) have a sort of similar system to WH's in that they use a large geared quadrant which is pivotted on a cross shaft giving a forward and back motion which is linked to the wheels via a bell crank. I imagine the auger based idea might be a bit similar to this. I think a longitudinally operating quadrant like this might fit a WH chassis quite well and with the space available, increasing the diameter to reduce the effort might be do-able.

 

I look forward to seeing your machine in action.

 

[ebinmaine 67,549]

2 hours ago, Damien Walker said:

I look forward to seeing your machine in action.

 

ME TOO !!!