1942 Oliver 60 Standard - Zenith Carburetor Cleaning

Yesterday I delved into the carburetor. In the title, I didn't say "carburetor rebuild" because I didn't buy any new parts for the project. I reused everything except the gasket between the two main halves. Usually a carburetor rebuild has new gaskets, new needle and seat, and maybe one or two other items.

The carburetor is not what came on the tractor. Oh, no, we can't be so fortunate to have the proper Marvel Schebler TSX-49. In fact, the more I work on this tractor, the more I think it was a parts tractor for someone's other Standard refurb. The tractor has wiring for lights, but there are no lights or brackets. The belt pulley is missing. The carburetor and linkage is wrong. There's no generator and an alternator that has never been hooked up is in its place. And the biggie, the radiator, radiator shell, and side panels are all missing. But in all fairness, this tractor was in this condition 30 or more years ago, when it was "only" a 50 year old tractor and probably not so desirable. Ok, so maybe it's still not that desirable but I'm sure it is more so now that it is 83 years old.

Whatever the case may be, I work with what I have. This Zenith carburetor, from what the all-knowing interweb says, is for a Towmotor Forklift with a Continental F-140 or F-162 flathead engine. Um, ok.

That piece of cobbled linkage in the above photo shows that someone in the past had to use up some brain cells to get the tractor's governor linkage to work with the throttle lever.

The below photo shows the carb model numbers stamped on a brass tag, 12384 and B55963. Yum, look at all that black gooey goodness.

There is a lever on the backside of the throttle shaft that has also been cobbled together (but is not being used). It looks like someone took a worm gear that fit the throttle shaft and brazed a lever arm to it. I wonder if I can use that lever to hook to the governor lever, as I think the original carb's lever was on the backside of the carb.

Look down into the bore of the carburetor. Yes, that's a mud dauber bee's nest in there. There is no air cleaner so the bees were able to just fly on in and take up residence. It's a small miracle that this engine ran at all with stuff like that inside the carburetor.

This next photo below shows the new gasket I cut, using the old gasket as a pattern.

The float level was set too high so I bent the float tabs to lower the floats to what looked more proper.

These next two photos below show the finished product. I didn't spend a lot of time cleaning things but it certainly looks better now than it did a couple of hours ago.

Here's the gunk that came out of the carb. Mmmm.

And it's all back together. The rod that hooks to the throttle linkage is simply a piece of threaded rod with a swivel doohickey on the end. Some day I'll have to make a better rod that doesn't look so hokey.

And note to self, close the choke whenever the tractor is parked, so bees don't decide to take up residence inside again. At least until I get a proper air filter put in place.