Hydro-gear wheel motor leak

[Mr Mower Man]

A customer brought in an HGM-15E-3055 wheel motor off a Ferris ZTR for me to rebuild last fall. I got a new seal kit ($250!) and bearing kit ($180!) and did the work for him. He calls me this morning and says the shaft seal is leaking oil. A friend of his said the seal looked pooched out and like it had a cut on it. So I'm assuming I damaged the seal during reassembly, and I plan to make it right. I'd like to just get the seal if I could, but there are no part numbers for that. Just the whole seal kit, which is going to set me back more than I'm comfortable with (about $180 my cost).

Anybody know a trick to getting that seal by itself, so I don't have to buy a whole seal kit? Or at least a much cheaper kit that uses the same seal. Or am I just gonna have to fact the music this time?

Thanks.

[bgsengine]

check your local area for industrial bearings and seals supply place if you can find any numbers on the seal they can cross reference, and they can also locate by size ,etc

[Mr Mower Man]

check your local area for industrial bearings and seals supply place if you can find any numbers on the seal they can cross reference, and they can also locate by size ,etc

Yeah, that's what I'm going to try to do. I have an account with McMaster-Carr out of Cleveland, and it looks like they have a good selection of shaft oil seals. I've bought stuff from them before with great results. $20 will be a lot better than $180!

[Elader]

check your local area for industrial bearings and seals supply place if you can find any numbers on the seal they can cross reference, and they can also locate by size ,etc

Yeah, that's what I'm going to try to do. I have an account with McMaster-Carr out of Cleveland, and it looks like they have a good selection of shaft oil seals. I've bought stuff from them before with great results. $20 will be a lot better than $180!

Great tip. Didn't thought McMaster-Carr got a good selection of oil seals and stuff.

[Mr Mower Man]

OK, an update. Not going well. The seal that the customer saw that was damaged was just the dust seal, not the oil seal. So that wasn't causing the leak. Oil seal had to be the problem, though I could not see any damage to the seal at all. Not sure why it was leaking, but I was still thinking I may have done something to it during the assembly process. I ended up buying another Hydro-Gear seal kit, because I couldn't find a seal the right size (1-13/16" OD x 1-3/8" ID x 3/16" HT). It's a single lip seal with no spring (not really room for one, the way it's made; more of a "solid" construction), and rubber coats the outer diameter of the seal as well. I looked online at a bunch of places that boasted they had the right seal for any application. They apparently forgot about this one, and so did McMaster-Carr. I'm starting to see maybe why this seal kit is so expensive. Must be a custom size. Since every measurement in the parts breakdown is metric, it's probably a metric seal. I looked for these too, but everything was either too big or too small. All the outer diameters I found jumped from 45mm to 47mm, when 46mm is what would work here. Aggravating!

So I rebuild it again with the 2nd seal kit. I was particularly careful not to cut the seal with the shaft keyway, wrapping plastic around the shaft as I put it through the seal. I could see a couple of shiny rings on the shaft, where I suppose the oil and dust seals were. But I couldn't feel the rings at all, so I thought all was OK. I gave the re-assembled motor to the customer the 2nd time yesterday, and he calls me today to tell me that he drove the mower about 10 feet and hydraulic fluid was leaking from the motor again already.

He's going to bring the whole mower this time (In case I didn't mention it earlier, it's a Ferris; not sure about the model number), which I'm glad for. That way I can see for myself how it leaks. I have no idea what I could've done wrong. I followed the steps in the Hydro-Gear service manual. I've rebuilt other wheel motors successfully. I'm going to contact Hydro-Gear Monday to see if they can offer any ideas. Did they get a bad batch of seals? Has the seal kit been sitting in a warehouse for years, allowing the rubber to harden or something? I'm afraid the only thing the customer is going to be able to do to fix the problem is replace the whole wheel motor if we can't stop the leaks on this one. And they're around $1500. Thanks, Hydro-Gear. Great job.

[38racing]

Any chance you have a pressure problem that forces oil past the seal?

[Luffydog]

The shaft may be bent causing the problems.