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Metal spraying advice needed for farm machinery sheet metal

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.
 
Coatings will be a nightmare. The bond between it and the parent material will never be as reliable as you want. Surface finish will cause problems with material flow and create chronic plugging issues. Lining it with UHMW has it’s own issues, as temperatures change it will expand at a different rate than the steel it is bolted to resulting in gaps that fill with chaff and moisture creating rust like you won’t believe. I have been in the business of dealing with rice harvesting equipment for nearly 20 years now. The high scilica content of rice makes it one of the most abrasive crops on the planet. I have personally dealt with the exact issues you are struggling with. Your best chance is to either replace the parts with stainless, or replace the header on a regular basis. Stainless is soft. When exposed to a constant sliding abrasive, this “softness” allows its surface to smear or burnish to an extremely high polish that makes it difficult for the abrasive material to dig in to it. High wear parts such as elevators, augers and drag floors we have replaced with stainless experience 3-6 times the wear life. It will not be the last time you have to deal with it, but it will be a while before you have to do it again. Here in California, there are many shops who will reproduce the factory components in stainless because the manufacturers will not.
 








 
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