Just plain weird

Last five days the boss has been cleaning the manure out of the cow pens with a Case 2090 and an old Knight manure spreader box that is set on an old truck frame with duals. Never have had a problem with the pto shaft. The square shaft has always slid into the drive tube about ten inches or so, could be a few inches longer but it has always worked fine. I was getting ready to quit for the day a few minutes ago and had just shut the door to the shop when he comes driving up to the shop with the tractor. I walked down along the side of the spreader to see what he had broken on it, figuring the chain had broken again. That was when I noticed both pieces of the pto shaft laying disconnected on the tongue. He said the front half just fell out of the rear half. I thought maybe the square part had broken a piece off and was still in the tube. We looked at both pieces, neither was broken or damaged in any way. We tried to mate them up and the square one would only go in the tube about an inch. Where the other eight or nine inches of the square one went we can't figure out. Just like it shrunk itself up and disappeared into thin air. Haven't had anything like that happen before.

Is your drawbar in its normal position? I know on a couple of mine, I can lengthen the drawbar to the point of pulling a shaft apart on a towed implement...

The "spreader" end might have a telescopic section and gotten shorter. Jim

Did you look at the female part. Some of those are made with about 8 inches of heavy stock welded on a lighter tube . I have seen that end come of or the weld break.

That is what is so weird about it, everything on the machine and tractor is the same as it was the day we hooked them together. No sign of the tube or square shaft having any thing broken off and nothing wrong with the hitch, pto on tractor, or the trailer frame. He had been hauling load after load all day with no problems and all of a sudden the front shaft ends up too short. Either gremlins or the paranormal.