ItsNotJunk: 1942 Oliver 60 Standard - Radiator, Generator and Tach Updates, and New Side Panels (Again)

Radiator hoses showed up at my door so I spent the morning finishing up the radiator mounts for the new aluminum radiator.

The radiator needed some black paint also. No self-respecting tractor guy would put a bare aluminum radiator in an old tractor.

Now all I need to find is some grille inserts.

The next project was to see what was going on inside the starter switch. It would get hot when I turned over the engine, which usually means corrosion somewhere, which doesn't allow full current to pass through the switch. In this case, the engine turned over very slowly when using a proper 6 volt battery.

There are four small tabs on the backside. I bent the two on the right up so I could get the switch apart.

Yup, a bit of corrosion going on there.

I cleaned things up as best I could and I can actually start the tractor with a 6 volt battery now, although the engine still turns over very, very slowly.

After all that work of cleaning the starter switch up, I bit the bullet and bought a new switch. The innards of the old one were quite thin in spots so it was only a matter of time before the thing gave me problems.

The new switch didn't help the starting situation any but I did notice the battery's woven ground cable was getting warm over its entire length. You know what that means. I need a new ground cable. And I just happened to have bought an industrial strength hydraulic wire terminal crimper for this very purpose. They are relatively inexpensive online ($35 delivered).

You simply pump the handle until the dies are touching each other. I didn't know what size my wire was so I started with 2/0 dies, but the wire was still a little loose in the terminal so I put in the 1/0 dies and crimped again. That did the trick.

I installed the new ground cable and that made a world of difference in the cranking speed of the engine with the 6 volt battery. As most old tractor people know, a 6 volt battery never cranks an engine very fast, which is why so many people change over to a 12 volt system. I prefer to leave things the way mother nature (and the tractor manufacturer) intended and stay with 6 volts. Oh, positive ground too, can't forget that. Here's a short video highlighting the new cable difference.

Things are coming together. Now to see if I can get the generator to work. I found a voltage regulator in the parts bin, so I quickly threw some wires on it and the generator. The tractor is supposed to have just a cut-out relay instead of a full-blown voltage regulator but this is what I had and it'll stay on the tractor for the foreseeable future. After this photo I did run the wiring better.

Wiring up a tractor generator used to send me to the internet for a wiring diagram but after working on so many tractors and the 1943 Dodge Weapon Carrier (all of which use a generator), I've gotten to the point that I don't need to find a wiring diagram anymore. And I also remembered to "flash" the generator so it is correctly polarized to the battery polarity. In this case, the 6-volt battery is positive ground.

Wouldn't you know it, the generator and regulator actually work. I really had no idea if they were in operational condition. The voltage was 6.52 before starting the engine and now with the engine running, it's 6.67 volts.

The ammeter shows a charge also. Yay! It may not be evident in the photo below but the dash light (above the ammeter) is also on. I connected it to the ignition switch so it is always on when the switch is on. The bulb is probably 12 volts so that's probably why it is dim.

It's a day later and I made some brackets to mount the coil and regulator more permanently. It still isn't pretty but it's better than it was.

Next I worked on getting the tachometer unstuck. It took probably an hour but I finally got it working without having to take it apart. That would have been a major task. The below photo shows the tach before I got it loosened up. The thing in the right foreground is what looks like an oil wick. Also, I ground a small hex wrench square on one end so I could put some torsional load on the stuck drive socket.

The hole in the center of the photo is where the oil wick goes. The wick was very tight in the housing and I was afraid I was going to break it off getting it out. Once out, I put oil in the hole and used a propane torch to heat up the threaded part to hopefully break things loose. It worked.

Below is the hex wrench, the oil wick, and a screw that I also ground to a square drive so I could use a cordless screwdriver to work the tach drive once things broke free.

The Ferguson TO-35 generator has a tach drive on the back. When I had two TO-35's, I had ordered a new tach drive cable but ended up not using it. Sure came in handy here.

The tach is just laying there for now. I'm not sure where I will mount it, as I don't really want to drill any extra holes in the Oliver's sheet metal. Oh yeah, the tach does work.

There is a hole in the dash that I presume is for a light switch. The tractor's lights are long gone so I decided to drill out the hole big enough to allow the tach drive cable threaded nut (and cable) to pass through so I could mount the tach to the steering column. The hole was maybe 1/16" too small so I used a step drill bit and enlarged the hole one step size, and it was just enough to let the nut through. The zip ties leave a little to be desired but it's what I had on hand to get the job done. I'll probably get a super long hose clamp at some point and lose the zip ties.

This next set of photos is several days after I mounted the tach shown above. I was at the local box store and was looking for a piece of plastic pipe that I could use to house the tach. I found a 4" ABS pipe cap but they wanted $20 for it. Yes, a simple black plastic cap for twenty bucks. So I wandered the plumbing aisle and ran across this toilet bowl flange shown below, and it happens to be the right dimensions. Less than six bucks. Yep, for this complicated thing (compared to a pipe cap), it was nearly 75% less than the price of the cap.

I cut the flange off using the band saw.

I then chucked the remains in the Seneca Falls Star, a 110-year-old lathe that still works fine.

Next is to make a backing plate. I had some left-over cutting board that I cut a circle out of.

One thing about machining plastic, it's very stringy and gets everywhere.

After I whittled down the right profile (I thought), I realized that I now need to remove 80% of the remaining disc so it will work with the tach. So much for flying by the seat of my pants when doing this machining work. This 3/4" thick disc ended up being less than 1/4" thick, with a 2" hole in the center.

The next two photos show the tach mounted in the modified toilet bowl flange, and a 5" hose clamp securing it to the steering column.

I got new louvered side panels from Lynch Farms Tractor Parts. I had bought the panels from Steiner Tractor but they came from India and were less than stellar (very poor quality control, seven or eight discrepancies), so I returned them and bought these for $200 more than the Steiner panels. They came in a nice box with a wood perimeter but one of the panels got bent on one corner, probably from FedEx dropping the box on its end. The damage is minimal and I can just bend it back to normal.