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Life with an old Farm Tractor
By 
InkandBrush | August 7, 2008
Ink & Brush Creations presents~ a Short Story on Farm life~ Written by R.Nees
Photos by me and all rights reserved.
~~Every time I use Dad’s old tractor, I am confronted with one thing or another that has the indelible fingerprint of our father….. one of the three point hitch arms is held on with the correct type of standard farm lynch pin…. the other is held on with a bent over 9/16” bolt. The list goes on….. I smile, every time. Dang, that guy knew how to improvise.
There has been a somewhat leaky fuel line on the thing, and I made the mistake of touching it a few days ago…. at which point it disintegrated. At least the end that fragmented was at the ‘high’ end of the line, and I could keep from flowing all of the fuel in the tank onto the ground while I had to run to town to find a piece of fuel line that would fit. I know this piece of line had been replaced at some point in the last 30 years, because the hose clamps used to attach it were not of the same type as on the OEM connections.
Managed to replace the line, and took a few minutes to hose all of the dust off the motor, and that led to spraying the grass seed, etc. out of the radiator fins. Less than 70% of them would flow water, so I took a nylon zip tie, and poked all of the slots between the cooling fins to remove the deibrus. Every 20 minutes or so, I would take the garden hose and check to see how much more of the radiator would flow water front to back…. after an hour, I must now have nearly 95% of the fins working as designed…….
Now that we have the fuel line fixed, and the radiator cleaned out, it’s time to do some mowing. except the battery is now flat.
How could that be? I replaced the battery 2 years ago! That led me to looking at the fan belt…… here’s the alternator, all the way to the end of it’s adjustment, the inside edge of the belt looks like rats died from gnawing on it sometime in the 1980’s, everything’s rusty…. the fan and alternator both would spin with pressure of one finger on them, without the belt moving. Did I mention this is a diesel, and it only uses the electricity to heat the glow plugs, and start the motor? No wonder there were no working light bulbs when I got this thing!
Had to go to town today anyway, to get ready for the interview tomorrow, so we picked up a new belt from NAPA. the looked it up in their ancient tractor catalog, and pulled the correct heavy duty belt out of whatever storage it was in.
Took it home, and took off the guards blocking access to the pulley locations….. (took the time to flatten said guards, and return them to the OEM shape, and used the correct nuts bolts etc to remount them) Had to snake the belt into place, and couldn’t get it on all three pulleys at the same time. Even with the alternator fully compressed, I could not get the new belt to migrate into the grove on the crank pulley, until I applied a squirt of Murphy’s oil soap for lubricant. Between that and a pry bar for the ‘proper application of leverage’ it all came together….. the alternator is now less than mid way through it’s adjustment range, I cannot budge either the fan or the alternator with any amount of pressure I can apply by hand, and after using my trusty echo to jump start it, I mowed in the heaviest grass on the place for over an hour…. and the tractor runs cooler than I have ever had it run in those conditions. 80 degrees F and I was in the sweet spot for most of the hour.
And there is more story to come, as Robert trys to fix the battery cable!
Life is never boring on a small farm with an old Tractor!!
( The ground clamp for my hot wire being used as a Battery bolt…sigh)
Each time I make an incremental repair/upgrade, it sticks….. the amount of effort to keep it running seems to be going down, rather than up.
It really does feel like I am in a conversation with my Dad, every time I work with the thing. There’s so much of him wrapped up in the quirks and solutions…….
In the form of an update on both the Tractor, and the employment status…..Turns out there’s more wrong than a flat battery with the tractor. I was mowing stuff so tall and thick the motor was bogging down. With all the crud in the radiator, and the bad fan belt, I would not have been able to do that. Adding the new belt and mowing for 4 hours straight was not enough to put a charge on the battery…. as soon as I turned it off, the battery was completely flat again. The tractor ran nice and cool, throughout, tho… that’s a big improvement.
That made me break out my fluke multimeter, to get a reading on the battery, then to get one on the running tractor to see if the alternator is generating 14+ volts…. Only, it’s been over 6 years since I last put a new battery in the Fluke, so needless to say it doesn’t work. Dug around for a 9 V battery, only to find out all the ones we have at the house are waaaayyyyy old. Cases have swollen up and they are completely lifeless.
I think my wife would notice, if I stole one out of one of the smoke detectors, especially since my son is baking me a birthday cake at the moment.
Turns out the electrical connection between the cable, and the battery terminal was the problem. Jump starting the tractor with my car allowed juice to get to the glow plugs, and to the starter, but bypassed the battery all together.
I know this, because I could measure the voltage on the jumper cable clamps @ 14.8 VDC, with them clamped onto the cables from the tractor to the battery terminals. Poking the terminal end itself, measured only 12.5 VDC. No juice through the connection.
Taking the cable off the terminal, and sanding the terminal allowed shiny metal to show…. a much better conductor. Sanding the inside of the cable clamp also produced shiny metal…. but the bolt had rotted away, to the point that it would not apply mechanical force to the clamping surface.
I needed a new bolt. Did I mention I live 10 miles from the nearest source?
Now that I have good, direct contact, the Tractor starts right up.
Yes, I have bought a new cable, anti corrosion compound, and plan on replacing my ‘artwork’ at first opportunity. I had to use the bolt to tap the holes on the cable clamp…. I don’t know what the metal alloy is in the clamp, but it was soft enough that I could cut threads with the steel bolt. Got pretty hot, but that was allowable.
I’ve got a complete circuit. The bronze clamp/tear drop thingy, I could have cut off, and just used the threaded end…. since I planned on buying another cable with new termination, I left it ‘normal’ so I could use the rod clamp as designed…… I still have one more ground rod I can drive in.Fence gives you a pretty good whack as it is; I don’t really want to increase the effect if I don’t need to.
So I managed to stop at a local hardware store and bought myself a replacement battery cable for the tractor… along with those felt pads for under the terminals, and a can of spray on preservative to reduce corrosion in the future.
A few days later (yesterday) I managed to get the time to actually pull the old positive cable off the tractor and bolt in my replacement. Dressed it up quite nicely, with the little felt pad, and the purple spray on stuff……
Which made me look at the negative battery cable with some distaste……..
“Well, I’ll just loosen that up, clean up the connection, add the felt pad, and bolt it back down”. Did I mention I live 10 miles from the nearest place I can get replacement parts? Put the wrench on the nut of the bolt clamping that cable on the terminal, and twisted.
Snap! The cable clamp broke right in half. Broke both legs off the ‘wishbone’ so to speak. No way to bodge that one together….. and there’s no way I am going to use my old kludge on the other side of the battery! Now I need to talk the wife into me making a trip to the hardware store to buy the Negative cable…….
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