Changing A Tire The Hard Way (and Replacing the PTO Shaft and Cut-Out Relay, and Fixing the Carburetor) - 1941 Ford 9N

The day I showed up to buy this 9N, the previous owner told me he was filling one of the rear tires with air on the tractor and the rim let go. As in, a section of the rim flange blew out. See it there? Kinda hard to miss. That was back 4-1/2 months ago. I figure it's time to tackle this little problem, as the tire obviously won't hold air the way it is and I can't move the tractor very easily.

I could have unbolted the wheel and tire from the tractor and taken the mess to someplace like Les Schwab, but with the condition of this tire (pretty severe cracks and checking), I doubt they would have taken on the job. So it fell to me to put things right.

Peeling back the tire a little, I found....... I'm not sure what...... inside the tire/wheel. Well, ok, I know some of it is rust, but there also looks to be mud. Lots of it.

Here's another view of the wheel.

I thought about trying to pry the tire over the rim but then had a brilliant thought. Since the outer rim is toast anyway, why not just cut it off. So that's what I did, using an angle grinder and cutoff wheel. Now it's just a simple matter of sliding the tire off the wheel. Yeah, simple.

Oh, here are the outer rim pieces.

Sliding the tire off was not without a fight. A 20-minute fight to be more precise. That's how long it took to break the tire bead off the inner flange of the wheel using a couple of small tire irons, a 3-pound sledge hammer, and a little pry bar. It was tough but could have been a lot worse.

And voila, the tire is off. Anyone want some pea soup?

Sorry to say, the inner tube didn't fare so well. I may have a left-over from the '49 Ferguson TO-20.

Just look at that mess inside the wheel.

The part on the left (below) is the inner disk that the wheel on the right bolts to. Most tractors of the day had two-piece wheels like this, an inner disk (either stamped steel like this one or cast iron) and an outer stamped steel wheel. Tractor wheels would get abused, plus they'd rust out from calcium chloride ballast, so an outer rim was a cheaper alternative than having to buy a wheel and center hub as a single unit.

An oxy-acetylene torch was used to heat the outer wheel nuts red-hot, then I doused them in water. That shock was enough to get the nuts loosened with just a modicum of force from the 20-inch-long, 3/4-inch-drive ratchet and 1-1/16" socket . I don't know if I'll be able to whack the bolts out of the ever-so-rusted wheel though. That's a fight for another day. It's getting dark.

The tractor is patiently waiting for its new wheel.

It's another day, and time to try and get the bolts out of the wheels. I wasn't too successful doing this same job on the '49 TO-20 wheels. I'll try to use more finesse and take my time on this wheel instead of just wailing away at the bolts (with the nuts threaded on loosely) with a sledge hammer like I did on the '49. An acetylene torch and lots of whacking with a sledge hammer and rebar drift, air chisel, etc. did finally work to get these six bolts out of the rusted mess of a wheel.

Fast forward six weeks, a new wheel showed up and I tried to salvage an inner tube from the TO-20 since this tractor's blow-out shredded its tube. I wasn't successful with the used tube so I had to break down and order a $50 tube off eBay. It came today and I set about putting this tractor back together. The bolts that I'd mentioned previously were very stuck in the rusted-out wheel so the threads on most of the six bolts got somewhat, shall we say, modified. Three bolts were able to be used after threading a nut on and off several times. But.....

The other bolts had kind-of mushroomed on their threaded ends from the pounding (yes, even with the nuts threaded on) so they had to be chucked up in the old 1929 South Bend lathe (click here) so their threads could be re-cut. I think a lot of folks don't know that you can do this type of thread chasing on a lathe. It just takes a bit of care to get the threading tool lined up as close as possible to the "valleys" of the threads. It really isn't that difficult. These next two photos below show a bolt chucked in the lathe.

The compound slide is used to slightly shift the tool left to right, making it easy to line up the tool to the thread valleys. I selected 18 threads per inch on the lathe's quick change gearbox, engaged the half nuts, and went to town.

One of the nuts somehow got mushroomed over a bit (I wonder how) so I had to shave off the damaged threads in the South Bend.

Finally, it's done!! Today's job of getting the tire and new tube onto the wheel, then repairing the bolts, then assembling everything, took about three hours. It will be fun to finally drive this tractor around the place with for aired-up tires.

The video below is an 11-minute version of getting the tire/tube onto the wheel, then mounting on the tractor.

A new issue reared its ugly head when I drove the tractor. The governor isn't working properly. Well, the governor seems to be working but the carburetor's throttle shaft gets tight and won't rotate freely when the engine is running. Very strange. I took the carb off three times trying to figure something out but I guess I'll need to take it off at least one more time to figure out the problem.

Ok, yet another day, and more time spent on carb removal. I won't go into a lot of details here but one thing I found was that the throttle plate had some slight wear marks on it. I filed them smooth and put everything back together. That must have been the issue because now the throttle response is good. Below is a photo of the throttle plate wear marks.

One last job before putting this tractor up for sale is to replace the broken PTO shaft. I bought a replacement on eBay for $72. This tractor isn't doing me any favors as far as making any money on its sale. Be that as it may, it'll sell better with a working PTO shaft. Here's the broken one.

It actually came out very easily. Not the norm when working on an 84 year old tractor.

I'm sure the new shaft is made in Pakistan or India. It looks nice though.

The new casting is a bit too big so the brackets on either side hit the casting. I used an angle grinder to grind the casting down so the bracket bolts would like up to the holes. A fairly easy fix.

It's a bit difficult to sell this thing but I have too many tractors and can't keep them all.

I also found out the cut out relay isn't working, so.... more bucks spent on this little money pit. $35 to be exact. Hopefully that's the last thing I need to buy. The next photo is of the old relay (it's not supposed to be in two pieces), then the new one.