Lack of maintenance

So I needed a new digger. A few years back I had bought a wil rich digger that was 33 foot wide. My big tractor couldn't pull that. And a few years back my big tractor certainly couldn't pull it. At that time I had a 70 horse white so I tore the wings off all together. Well now that I've got a 165 horse white I decided to trim down the wings and put them back on.

Long story short I've got it ready to go except for those pesky oil leaks with the hoses. Any who I was doing some finishing touches and I took it out for its maiden voyage yesterday. I noticed a walking tandem was loose so back to the yard I go. I tore it off and found that none of the bearings to have any grease. Good thing I have spare parts. Today I put the tandem back together and finished airing the tires up. I noticed one of the tires on the other tandem was loose. Closer inspection found the tandem wouldn't rock at all. Grrrrr. So I spent the afternoon tearing that apart. Only to find that rust was holding it together. It was so bad I had to cut the race off the axle. There was no way this had ever been serviced since the day it was sold new.

How can anyone neglect something like this. Plus to top it off the hub's have grease zerks so there should be no reason for this. Maybe I over maintenance things but it's cheap insurance I figure.

I understand your frustration. You are 100% spot on with maintenance being cheap insurance. (For example, if your Gleaner throws chains, instead of just putting the chains back on year after year instead of replacing the sprockets and chains the first time and doing it right, you run the risk of bending shafts. Then you're out more money.) I'm one of those guys that goes above and beyond on maintenance and preaches proper maintenance extremely heavily. Taking the short way out by neglecting any machine (regardless of color) is like nails on a chalkboard for me. Maintenance makes the difference in a 33 year old Gleaner combine that throws chains left and right, and one that goes trouble-free all season long. (Sadly, the first one is the one I mainly deal with, although I was blessed to run the latter last season for a friend) 

And yet, you took it out on the maiden voyage and "noticed" this. You didn't plan to check and maintain before you used it.   

I bought a used JD 700 planter last fall. When I finally got around to cleaning things up to get it going, I realized the chains had never been cleaned. It took me a half hour to find the connector links on a couple of them. I should have cut them off and replaced with new for the hours I spent working on it. I guess my time didn't cost me anything and I did learn something from the process.
 Then, some of the bushings on the idlers were wore clear thru and some of the idlers (most of them) were wore more than double the original ID size. 
 Luckily it only needed one finger and one spring to get the seed meter units working, but I spent a couple hours cleaning the soybean meters up.
 I also found a couple grease fittings on the clutch, that must have always been out of view when the guy got out his grease gun.

LeonR2013 wrote: If I remember right a 2PR IH corn picker had over a 100 grease zerks and a All Crop 66 somewhere around 80. Maybe it just seemed like that many, but we kept them well greased.

For some reason I thought it might be more than 80, but nevertheless, it is still quite a few. And not all of them are easy to get to, but I still make sure they get grease. If it's hard to get it greased, it will be even harder to replace the bearing if you don't grease it. Again, cheap insurance.