450C Track Adjuster

[Hartlyboy]

The right track adjuster of my 450C crawler was/is frozen at a spot that left the track too loose. All the messing with the grease chamber trying to compress or expand it made no impression so I decided I needed to replace it and am looking at the various parts options I've had input from you all on at this site.

But in the meantime, I wanted to run the machine to do a small job but couldn't stand the idea of working it with a slack track. To fix it temporarily , I took out the four 1/2" bolts attaching the adjuster yoke to the idler block [took some torch heat on the inside bolts], and put some spacers between the two parts. It had some thin spacers there already to align the idler initially and I kept those and added two identical 5/16" spacers on each side, put in some longer bolts to compensate, and put it back together. That small 5/16 shim took up all the slack that needed to be taken out of the chain and it seems to work pretty well.

Probably not what you pros would do but I wanted to take up the slack without splitting the chain and doing the adjuster replacement right now. It probably won't stay in adjustment all that long as the track parts wear again, but it works for now and I can make extra shims if I have to while gathering up the parts to do it right.