Getting a tractor this old that has a modicum of electrical and electronic paraphernalia, it's bound to have been tampered with in the past. This tractor is the epitome of being tampered with. But I digress. The first order of business was to see if a new tachometer drive cable would get the tach working again. No telling how long it's been stuck at 4,906.3 hours. As you can see in the photo, the tach is now working. Not too sure about the hour meter yet.
I started the tractor up and let it run for a while. Seemed like forever but the tenths digit finally ticked over to point-four. Yay! The 4 is a little darker than the 3, so the 3 has probably been showing for a number of years. The interesting thing about this hour meter is that it is mechanically driven by the tach cable. I don't quite know how an hour meter can be very accurate if it is being driven by a constantly fluctuating rotating cable. It doesn't really matter though, as long as the tach is operational again.
One little tidbit is that while changing the oil today, I found where someone had written the hours and date the oil was last changed, 4655 hours on 6/14/2014. So it's been nine years and 251 hours since the last oil change.
Just about every wire behind the dash and down by the starter and alternator have been spliced using butt and/or spade connectors. And the mice behind the dash didn't do the wiring any favors. The alternator lamp on the dash is constantly on, so I'm assuming there is a wiring issue with the alternator, or the alternator is bad. Hopefully it's the former.
So it's the next day now. I took a look at the wiring and also the alternator regulator. The plug on the regulator was quite corroded so I cleaned it up some and when I started the tractor, the alternator was charging the battery. That was an easy fix. I then cleaned up all the frayed and broken wiring in the dash.
The next step was to figure out why the transmission was grinding when going into gear. This is where a semi-catastrophic event happened. I adjusted the clutch pedal travel to about an inch play at the top end and was then pushing the pedal with my hand to see what the lower limit of the pedal was when I heard a loud *pop* in the transmission case. At that point there was no clutch resistance felt in the pedal and the clutch no longer disengaged. That's not good. Guess I don't know my own strength.... (a feeble attempt at a little Bullwinkle the Moose humor).
I was then resigned to tear into the tractor to fix that little clutch issue, which meant extracting the engine to get to the clutch and throwout bearing. I figured I'd remove the front end loader first to free up some space around the engine. Four hours into fighting to get the two bottom pins out of the loader frame (using an 18" pipe wrench with 2' pipe extension, acetylene cutting torch, welder, and sledge hammer), I finally gave up and started tearing things off the tractor to get to the engine. I may still decide to remove the loader to get the engine out, I just don't know yet, but here's the status of the tractor as of tonight, 5/29/2023:
Update 6/28/2023
I think I've figured out why the clutch was not disengaging. I was installing a new clutch disc and reusing the original pressure plate. While tightening the pressure plate bolts, I noticed two of the three tabs were broken off. I went to look in the clutch bell housing and found these two pieces (below) laying in the bottom, semi-buried in clutch dust. It's not easy to tell where they came from but directly below the right piece, there's a riveted part. A piece broke off the riveted part in two of three places. These little tabs are supposed to pull the pressure plate away from the clutch disc when the clutch is disengaged. With only one tab still functional, the pressure plate wasn't being pulled away from the disc, thus the grinding into gear problem I was having. Now I have to wait probably another week to get a new pressure plate. *sigh*
No comments:
Post a Comment