NX travel pedal return spring

[DieselBound]

Just had ANOTHER travel pedal spring break on me. Have others encountered this? It was a total BEAR to replace the first one and I'm not really wanting to go through doing this again. There are TWO springs, inner and outer, one for each pedal. First time it was the forward travel pedal (inside spring). The current broken one is the outer one, for the reverse pedal. The factory ones are torsion springs. I'm wondering if I can use an extension spring on the lever (5 o'clock in pic), anchoring to the elbow on the hydraulic line (about 8 o'clock in the pic; yeah, cheesy but that's really the only anchor point I can see- spring would be wrapped around threads but those threads never get engaged by the hose fitting). One leg of the broken torsion spring can be seen at about the 10 o'clock position in the pic.

 

[MTGreen]

Just had ANOTHER travel pedal spring break on me. Have others encountered this? It was a total BEAR to replace the first one and I'm not really wanting to go through doing this again. There are TWO springs, inner and outer, one for each pedal. First time it was the forward travel pedal (inside spring). The current broken one is the outer one, for the reverse pedal. The factory ones are torsion springs. I'm wondering if I can use an extension spring on the lever (5 o'clock in pic), anchoring to the elbow on the hydraulic line (about 8 o'clock in the pic; yeah, cheesy but that's really the only anchor point I can see- spring would be wrapped around threads but those threads never get engaged by the hose fitting). One leg of the broken torsion spring can be seen at about the 10 o'clock position in the pic.

View attachment 829750

Repeated spring breakage is either due to poor design or poor quality heat treat. Since you didn't have the same one break both times it's possible your tractor got a bad heat treat batch from the factory and replacement of the second one may remedy the issue for the life of the tractor.

If I was in your shoes I would replace the second broken one with a factory part first. Then if one of them breaks again you can be reasonably certain it's a design problem versus a heat treat problem - which would then warrant re-engineering a different spring solution

 

[DieselBound]

Part of my reason for posting this was to see if others have had this problem: I'd not heard of anyone reporting so. If it's rare then it's unlikely a design issue and is like to be a very localized metallurgical issue. I'll note that the first broken spring showed signs of stress that was lurking for a long time: it existed when the tractor was new and I just thought it was the pedal rubbing and that it would wear in a bit- it was actually more noticeable as the tractor got warmer (increased pedal activations would accompany that, causing the spring's metal to more readily flex at the point where it was breaking down).

I cannot stress it enough, replacing these springs is a gawd-awful process. Access is poor and there's a lot of little pieces involved in the whole mechanism (which needs to completely disassembled in order to install a simple spring). Owing to that experience I will be using an "external" spring and hope it holds up.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

Anything that you can make work, works.

 

[Threepoint]

I've not heard of this issue before, either. So I'll be curious to see if you get more feedback. FWIW, my NX is a 2014.

 

[DieselBound]

Replaced with a factory spring. I could NOT find an appropriate spring for use as an external attachment. This job is what I remember it to be: a huge PITA. Should there be a next time I'll be dropping the hydraulic fluid filter on its bracket in order to give me more room to get the pedal mechanism out.

Asked the guy at the parts counter whether he'd run across anyone else with this issue and he said he hadn't. There are several people there in which case this doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. Not an epidemic, obviously.