Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I'm in that exact situation right now. I purchased a used Tigermate II a couple of years ago. It sat in the dealer's lot for at least one Winter. Last Spring I noticed that the holes where the shanks and the spring should pivot were wearing into the support bracket. This is the other end you refer to. I would certainly look that end over. I'm not concerned about the egg shaped area that you point out since I believe it would take considerably more wear on that end to become a problem.
I believe my wear is due to the fact that the bushing seized and the movement of the shanks caused the bolts to turn and wear in the holes rather than turning within the bushings. CIH must be aware of this problem in a sense because new shank assemblies are made the same except they use larger bolts.
We removed about half the entire spring shank assemblies. I used a compression block from CIH which allowed me to put the shank assembly in a large vise and compress the springs enough to remove the pivot bolt in the spring as you show in your picture. My plan is to weld some pieces of flat steel over the holes. We will reassemble with longer new bolts. I'm at the point where I have removed the springs and have the "patch" welded in place. The remaining reassembly is a Winter job we haven't gotten to yet.
The compression block is just a piece of fairly thick flat steel with a slot cut into it. To use it, one backs off the spring enough to get the piece of flat in between the bolt head and the bracket. Then when the bolt is tightened it compresses the spring more than usual which creates some slack to remove the cross bolt to disassemble the unit. Once the cross bolt is removed, the spring bolt can be loosened and the block removed. To reassemble requires the reverse process.
My fear is that the compression block might fly out as we are compressing the spring for reassembly which would be dangerous. My plan is to try to make a guard of sorts that can be used during the reassembly phase for protection. I think we can create a guard out of a couple of piece of 2 x 6 with a hole in one through which we can stick the socket to tighten the bolt. The other piece of wood would hopefully deflect the tensioning block while we are reassembling should it become dislodged.
I will take some pictures of the process when we perform the reassembly. Hopefully this will buy us a few more years of use since the entire shank parts (you must buy more parts than you might think) is quite expensive.
Edited by tedbear 1/22/2025 00:39
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Rebuilding tigermate II shanks
