Implement Repair in Ames — If It Hooks to a Tractor, We Fix It

Every farm has one: the implement sitting at the end of the shed row with something broken on it. A grain auger with the flighting worn to a knife edge. A manure spreader with a floor chain that jumped. A gravity wagon with a gate that hasn’t slid right since the Clinton administration. It’s never quite broken enough to deal with today — until the day you need it, and then it’s the only thing on the farm that matters. Ames Hydraulics does implement repair for exactly those machines: the towed, hitched, and hooked-on equipment that doesn’t have its own engine but does all the work anyway.

We’re set up for this because farm implement repair is mostly three trades in one building — heavy welding, hydraulics, and machine work — and we do all three under one roof.

Why Implements Break Where They Break

Implements don’t wear out politely; they break at the stress points. Everything loads through the tongue and hitch, so that’s where cracks start. Moving crop is abrasive, so flighting, chains, and floors grind away a little every load. Frames flex over every field entrance, so old welds let go at the corners. Good implement repair starts with knowing those patterns — when a machine hits our floor, we check the spots that fail next, not just the spot that failed first, and we put steel back stronger than the factory did. Most of what’s on this page is welding work before it’s anything else, which is why our welding and fabrication shop is the engine behind it.

What Comes Through Our Door

Planters

Planters are precision machines carried on brute-force steel, and both halves fail. On the steel side: cracked tongues and hitches, bent marker arms, and fatigued frame welds. On the working side: row unit parallel arms worn sloppy, bushings and pivots egged out, and down-pressure systems that can’t hold a setting. Our planter repair work tightens all of it back up — because a row unit rattling on worn arms puts seed everywhere except where the monitor says it did.

Grain augers

An auger has one job and two ways to fail at it. Grain auger repair here covers both: flighting that’s worn thin, sharp, and undersized — we build it back up or replace sections outright — and the drives that turn it, from gearboxes that whine and weep to bent top ends from a wind gust or a hurried move. A worn auger moves less grain per minute and cracks more of what it moves; fall is a bad time to discover both.

Grain carts

Carts get the combine’s whole harvest through them and take the abuse quietly — until the unload auger folds slow, the PTO driveline vibrates, or the hitch shows a smile-shaped crack. We handle the fold and pivot hydraulics, driveline and clutch work, auger flighting, and the frame and hitch welding that keeps a loaded cart where it belongs: behind the tractor.

Manure spreaders and honey wagons

Nothing on the farm works in a worse environment, and it shows. Manure spreader repair is a steady part of our schedule: stretched and jumped apron chains, worn or bent beater assemblies and paddles, rotted and torn floors we cut out and re-sheet, and endgates and slop gates that won’t seal or won’t move. On the liquid side, honey wagons come in for gate valves that leak, plumbing repairs, and the tank and frame welding that keeps a heavy load of liquid legal on the road. It’s dirty work. Bring it anyway — washed out, please.

Gravity wagons

Gravity wagons fail slow and all at once: a door that binds, a chute that’s rusted thin, a running gear with shot spindles or a bent reach, and box seams that start leaking grain in a trail down the road. We re-work doors and chutes so they slide like they should, repair and replace running gear components, and re-weld or re-sheet the box seams. As implement repair goes, wagon work is some of the highest-return money a farm can spend — cheaper than a new wagon by a mile, and done in days.

Repaired Stronger Than It Left the Factory

Factory welds are built to a price. Ours are built to a customer who’ll be back if it breaks again. When we repair a tongue, we gusset it. When we fix a cracked corner, we figure out why it cracked and reinforce the load path, not just the crack. When a part doesn’t exist anymore — and on older implements, it usually doesn’t — we fabricate it. That’s the difference between patching a machine and doing implement repair that ends the problem.

The hydraulic side gets the same standard: every cylinder we rebuild off an implement is pressure tested before it goes back on, and hose assemblies are built here while you wait instead of ordered from three counters.

One Shop for the Whole Fleet

Planter to spreader to wagon, and the tractors and combines that pull and fill them — our farm equipment repair page covers the self-propelled side of the fleet. One shop that knows every machine on your place is worth more than six shops that each know one.

That implement at the end of the shed row isn’t going to fix itself, and its season is coming. Call or text Ames Hydraulics at 515-292-2599 for implement repair, or bring it to 210 Freel Dr, Ames, IA 50010, Monday through Friday, 7AM–5PM. Free pickup and delivery within 60 miles — we’ll come get it, weld it, tighten it, and bring it back ready for the season it was about to ruin.