Okay. I'm a farm boy so I grew up around corn and soybeans and the equipment used to handle them. I assume you're around the Palouse region? I have no familiarity with that area and limited familiarity around wheat. But I also spent my younger years as a millwright working in various grain elevators and grain handling facilities in the midwest. I've also seen high wear areas on combines and had to deal with them from time to time. IMO, there is no getting around wear in grain handling equipment, especially augers and drags.
I don't know about your specific problem, but I know a dry soybean is an extremely abrasive object. I've seen moving soybeans wear through 1/4" AR plate in a few days. Walk into any grain handling facility in the midwest and you will see patches on patches, even if the place is only a year old. I used to work a yearly turn-around every summer at a Cargill soybean plant that cracks the damn things. They shut the place down for overhaul every year. They have to. They take all the hexane off site and tear everything apart then rebuild it.
One thing we used to line wear areas was this: Grain Rino Hyde comes in various configurations; you can even get it with ceramic chips and steel mesh embedded in it. To line it on steel you use an elevator bolt: McMaster-Carr These are bolts used to attach buckets to leg belt lagging. UHMW really works good, but it is not really that feasible because it is too damn expensive. But you might consider it for very specific areas like your skid plates and use a countersunk head bolt to hold it on. Make the UHMW thick enough to stand up for awhile.
One more thing: RTV caulk is the only substance known to man that will stand up to a dry soybean for very long. When I first walked onto a Cargill turn-around many years ago, the Cargill folks had the stuff in 55 gallon barrels and the whole place was/is held together with RTV caulk. Soybeans just bounce off it for a long time, but eventually the beans will inevitably win. So if you have an area that is hard to line, try a tube of RTV caulk on it. One of the nice things about it is it will stick to anything and you don't have to do any prep to make it stick.
I don't know about your specific problem, but I know a dry soybean is an extremely abrasive object. I've seen moving soybeans wear through 1/4" AR plate in a few days. Walk into any grain handling facility in the midwest and you will see patches on patches, even if the place is only a year old. I used to work a yearly turn-around every summer at a Cargill soybean plant that cracks the damn things. They shut the place down for overhaul every year. They have to. They take all the hexane off site and tear everything apart then rebuild it.
One thing we used to line wear areas was this: Grain Rino Hyde comes in various configurations; you can even get it with ceramic chips and steel mesh embedded in it. To line it on steel you use an elevator bolt: McMaster-Carr These are bolts used to attach buckets to leg belt lagging. UHMW really works good, but it is not really that feasible because it is too damn expensive. But you might consider it for very specific areas like your skid plates and use a countersunk head bolt to hold it on. Make the UHMW thick enough to stand up for awhile.
One more thing: RTV caulk is the only substance known to man that will stand up to a dry soybean for very long. When I first walked onto a Cargill turn-around many years ago, the Cargill folks had the stuff in 55 gallon barrels and the whole place was/is held together with RTV caulk. Soybeans just bounce off it for a long time, but eventually the beans will inevitably win. So if you have an area that is hard to line, try a tube of RTV caulk on it. One of the nice things about it is it will stick to anything and you don't have to do any prep to make it stick.