I am trying to repair a small pin hitch, ground-driven Newer Spreader. The flat-free tires are in decent shape, and both sets of bearings are tight and work fine. Normally, when the brackets on each rim are flipped, it locks the wheels to the axle and starts turning the drum. On this one, the drum is not locked to the axle. Seems like a shear pin or something has broken, but I cannot get inside the drum to find/fix the problem. The wheels are completely frozen to the axle. A new drum assembly and two tires is $500. Rather than spend the money, I'm wondering if cutting an access hole in the drum might allow me to tack-weld or find some other way to lock the drum to the shaft. Anybody ever tackled this problem?

If anyone runs into a similar problem. Once I drilled an access hole in the drum, it appears that the drum assembly uses a round axle nested inside a square tube. The axle and tube may have been pinned together with rivets. Whatever was supposed to keep the round axle from spinning inside the square sheared off. Working thru the new access hole. I was able to drill a 1/4" hole thru the tube and most of the way thru the round axle. Twisted a 1/4" self-tapping bolt into the hole, then patched the access hole with a small scrap of aluminum pop-riveted in place.

This would have been a lot easier to work on if the wheel bearings and pillow block bearing assemblies had not been completely rusted to the axle. The bearings were otherwise in good condition, so I didn't want to destroy them.