I was coming up on a big pile of dirt with my D4 Traxcavator today and shoved the clutch ahead and it wouldn't stop. It ran into the pile and I killed it before I figured out what had happened. Then I realized the lever went ahead but the clutch didn't disengage. I pulled the cover off and found that the throwout coller had worn through on the front side.

Here I was with a big mess in the yard and a broken tractor in the middle of everything. The wife was yelling at me for breaking her tractor and making a mess. I am wondering if I am going to have to pull the top cover to fix it....I might never get it back together.

I started her up and was able to pull both frictions and jam it into gear. I was able to mitigate the mess by making a few pushes and some backdraging. I parked it in its spot without thinking of getting underneath. I pulled the cover and looked at it again. It is a split collar and it looked like I might get it out but I am thinking how many hundreds of dollars is it going to cost?

Then I thought about the old 5T up on the hill. I had never been able to get it running yet but I think it will so I am not ready to part it out. It was a lot easier to get into than the Traxcavator. I had it out of there in notime. The top funnel bolt was loose and cranked right out. I got the nut off the collar that was facing up real easy. Then something magic happened. The yoke shifted somehow and the collar rotated 180 degrees and the nut and lock that was facing down was staring me in the face. I Pulled the 2 capscrews and the brake plate and it was out.

Now if I got it out of the 5T through the inspection cover, theoreticly I should be able to do it on the Traxcavator. Yeah right, you have to be standing on your head to work in there. I did get the top funnel bolt out. The biggest fight with that was to get the capscrew out that holds the bracket for the oil line, that took hours.

The problem now is I can't get the yoke to let go of the collar like it did on the 5T. I need to go up and look at it again and see if I can figure out what happened. I have already been underneath the Traxcavator, the biggest problem is the drain plug is in there, I think it is going to give me fits to get it out and I am not sure I have a socket to get the bolt out anyway. It would sure be nice if I could get that yoke out like I did on the 5T.

Tomorrow is another day...

Tom

You might crawl back underneath and pull the clutch access cover and see if you can loosen things up from there. If you have a skid pan, it's gonna be awkward seeing in there as you gotta "scrunch" between the skid pan and track but you can work in there, one hand at a time. If you can run it up on a pair of railroad ties or something similar, it'll give you a lot more room. Also, there's another pivot bolt holding the collar and yoke together that can be reached through the drain plug hole in the clutch housing. .it might have been missing on the T and that's why it rotated.

If I remember right, I priced those parts a year or so ago from Western States Cat and the price was around $150 then for the collar, brake plate and bolts.