Besides hunting for old replacement pads from another tractor, what do people do to older ones to make increase the grosser height?

What you can do with grousers if they are worn down on height is weld a strip of metal on top the worn one. At the dealer I worked for they did that all the time for customers & it worked out good. I can,t remember where they got the strips but they were already cut to length & tapered like the original ones were.

Try looking at:
URL="http://www.dura-tuff.com"]http://www.dura-tuff.com[/URL]
They have a number of weld on grouser bars. I believe the "King of the Obsolete" has had some experience with this as well, you may want to contact him via this site.

Get them good and clean and weld them on with 7018. Spend some time with the prep work and its likely you will never break one. You can rotate the track from front to back so you can weld it a flat postion. Takes a while but its a lot cheeper than a new set of pads.

there were some good write-ups on grouser bars a few weeks ago.

You might want to refer to "waukman's" post dated 1/15/07----titled "D4 grouser pad repair".

The above website is listed----plus a pretty good discussion on the subject.

Delta Dirt

Thanks for the info.

For the low buck fix you can also use AR flat bar (abrasion resistant)

Like was said above, get some good quality steel. I have seen alot of stuff welded to the pads. Some people have tried to build them up with weld, others have welded re-bar (like the stuff you put in cement) It doesn't take long for it to fall off.

We get grouser stock from ALRO steel. Good quality stuff.

I like to put the machine up on blocks and work from the rear of the machine, usually can do three or four pads at a time per side. when they are all on, i move to the front and work there.

get some 7018 rod, keep it dry, it doesn't like the humidity. Put the ground clamp on the pad that you are working on, plan on spending alot of time in the shop. Have some buddys over to help cut to length and tack em on.

Oh yeah, your buddies will be drinkig all your beer while you are welding, they will think that you won't be able to see them through the welding shield, lol

Have fun..............

I havn't done one for years but I don't recall that the grouser stock was particularly expensive. With all the work involved in the welding I would not want to use anything but the real grouser bars. They are tapered at just the right angle and the edge that you weld is vee'd correctly for welding.