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.
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.
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.
These last two photos are of the panels installed. It really spiffs up the tractor.
There's the other Oliver 60 in the background. It's what this tractor is striving towards.... we may never make it there.
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