JDcrawlers Messageboard

While on the road I found some air horns in a friends garage and blew air through them. They worked perfectly. So I took one apart and found the chamber, the flat round disk, and, ... A spring! I thought, 'Gee, I don't remember mine having springs between the back cover against the disk!' Back home,...

Thanks to all for the continuing stream of ideas. I disassembled them. Yes, there were bugs, mostly paper wasp nests, and I cleaned out all the dirt and crud. Neither the horns nor their trumpets showed any adjustability as I remember. There was just the trumpet, the base with an input slot shaped w...

Most first-time crawler buyers think they know what kind of crawler they want but once they discuss their proposed uses they realize that a different crawler may suit their needs better. Sometimes even a different type of machine is better than a crawler for their proposed uses. I was thinking if y...

If you really want to go and look at this machine, bring somebody with you who knows old Deere crawlers... even if you have to pay them. Minimize your risk as much as you can. I second Ken's advice. I "ran into" a JD Crawler mechanic and asked him about the frozen clutches on my 450B. He explained ...

On the 450A the connection from the steering lever to the clutch/brake is completely mechanical. The input and output shafts of the steering cylinders are the same piece of metal. When the 450A sits awhile the pivots of the linkages inside the clutch housings can get rusted. When you activate the cl...

When I had this problem the wire from the starter button to the starter had broken behind the instrument panel. Also the rubber had split covering the starter button switch. Bought another switch at NAPA, its cover fit my starter button. My unit has had the neutral switch disconnected. If yours is s...

Interesting thread. In North Idaho a mill will not accept logs until a logger presents a standard form contract from the landowner stating location and permission to log. It keeps people from stealing logs from unattended land. The mill then sends to the owner a computer printed statement of every l...

If it is like a 450, there is a setscrew in the brake drum that locks it to its splined shaft. You access it through a plug above the small bearing housing in the final drive, and you will have to look in the top of the clutch housing as you rotate the clutch to see when it is lined up. The setscrew...

I just fixed the same problem on my 450B. The angling frame has a "tab" on each side on which the blade and the curved plate ride, and where the shims would be located. With the blade off, looking at the end of this tab, it had the cross section of a football - worn top and bottom, fat in the middle...

My left clutch engages intermittently and does not pull well under load. The right one seems to work normally. I understand (or as near as I can tell from the manual) that, unlike the 450B whose steering clutches are held engaged by the pressure plate springs, the 450C has a hydraulic "throw in" pis...

Just a thought. My Case 580 backhoe lost power and it turned out to be an added hydraulic diverter valve for some unknown attachment. My 450C has such a valve to divert hydraulic oil from the dozer blade to the backhoe. Since I don't have a backhoe attachment this valve just shunts oil back to the t...

During my recent 450B track replacement I found the rear two feet of one track frame (not the rock guard; rather the 3/4" channel) was bent out. It was hard to figure how that could have happened but I still wanted it straight. With a friend, we used two cutting torches (too cheap to buy a rosebud) ...

While we're on oils, I can get both "Tractor Fluid" and "Hydraulic Oil" in 5 gallon buckets at Costco. Are they ever interchangable? It seems tractor fluid goes in transmissions and can also be used for hydraulics. Is either a replacement for Hygard? In automobile's hydraulic brakes we're always cau...

If you only had to move it a couple hundred feet in a straight line you could jack it up and place a "sandwich" of two 2x10s stuffed with 2" pipe "rollers" under each track. With two more boards you "leapfrog" the bottom ones and tow or push the tractor along. I'd use at least 8 pipe rollers on each...

I encourage you to ponder what you will do with the machine and consider a fully hydraulic 6-way dozer blade instead. I would have nothing else. I originally started on my friend's old IH TD-9 with a blade like the one you're looking at and always hated it for the inconvenience of having to manually...