1936 John Deere Model BO First Repairs

It never seems to take long for me to do some fiddling on a new-to-me tractor, even though I'm in the middle of fixing the hood on my Ferguson TO-35. That project has just got to wait, since I have a new favorite toy to play with.

Today's first job was to fix the clutch rod. Someone in the distant past thought it was a good idea to weld an iron pipe nipple onto the rod, I presume for strength. One big problem was that in doing so, they made the rod un-adjustable for length. They also welded the pipe to the cast steel clevis on the end of the rod. That's also not good. My job was to fix the mess... Oh yeah, and straighten the rod.

Mm-hmm, that's pretty nasty.

I took a cutoff wheel and did some slicing into the pipe, then used a cold chisel to knock the pieces off. It worked pretty well.

The next step was to see if I could break loose the threads in the clevis, preferably without snapping off the threaded end of the rod. I heated the clevis red hot with an oxy-acetylene torch, then quenched it in water. That usually does the trick with stuck fasteners, and as you can see below, it worked great. Now I just need to straighten the rod, clean things up, and add a coat of green paint.

This next photo below shows the rod being test-fit. It's ready for paint. The yellow throttle rod will also come off to get green paint. It was also bent (how do these things happen?) but I straightened it out.

Both rods have a coat of paint now. Oh, look, the drawbar also needs paint....

While I had the paint out, I decided to paint the spark plug wire conduit, as it was also the incorrect yellow. I'll show a "before" photo first, then the after photo.

Here's the "after" photo. The new green paint makes the engine look a little dreary though.

Yes that piece of sheet metal at the bottom of the photo also needs some paint. It needs some cracks welded up first though. Another day.

The next repair had to do with the steering. It seemed very difficult to turn the steering wheel and there was a lot of play, which on an old tractor is usually par for the course. It seemed like the steering shaft might be bent slightly, causing the tightness. The shaft is coming in from the upper left of the photo below and it goes into the large steering worm adjusting nut on the round steering box in the center of the photo. I ended up unthreading the nut all the way out, filed the shaft a little to remove a high spot, then threaded the adjusting nut back in after greasing the bearings on the worm gear. While threading the nut in, I could tell it would still bind up on the shaft at certain points of rotation, so I made sure to turn the nut to the best position possible for the least amount of binding.

There was still quite a bit of play in the steering but turning the steering wheel was much easier. I then looked under the tractor where the steering drag link (rod in the center of the photo below) was connected to the steering arm. There's an adjusting nut on the left end of the drag link, and that tightens up onto the steering arm. There was maybe 3/16" of play in that joint, so I tightened up the nut. Something of interest, the cotter pin was missing that would hold the nut from backing out. The nut was most likely too tight to back out on its own but the tractor would lose steering if the nut did come out. Glad I found that.

Below is a poor photo of the adjusting nut and new cotter pin.

The next project was to try and fix the excessive crankshaft end play. The spec is .005-.010" of end play and this one has .045" (a little more than 1/32"). It's not a huge amount like 1/4" that I've heard people have, but it is quite a bit above the spec. I loosened the two large nuts on the backside of the flywheel, drove steel wedges into the flywheel slots to try and open up the splines, and beat on the flywheel a lot but I just couldn't get the thing to move in at all. I gave up and will try some other time.

A few days later.......

I decided to paint the two pieces of rusty metal on the forward ends of the rear fenders. For whatever reason the previous owner didn't paint them and they looked bad next to all the nice green stuff. The right side piece needed to be welded in a few spots before paint. The left side piece had some deep rust pock marks in it but I just left those alone. It is an 88-year-old piece of metal, after all. This first photo below shows the before condition. They are the two grey pieces of metal kind of in the middle of the photo. Then the remaining photos below are the after condition.