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The final part of this saga took place yesterday when we took the Trusty back to Wales. Lovely weather (as you can see from the pictures) but it didn’t go entirely according to plan.
We got there nice and early so that the owner, Pete, could have a good look at it before he went off to do his voluntary work at a local museum. Once at the farm we unloaded it onto a piece of level ground so that I could start it up. As you can see from the pictures there isn’t much level ground in the neighbourhood, but there was a bit at the back of the trailer and so I prepared to start it up where it was unloaded.
Wind the strap onto the pulley, set the throttle to 1/4 open, turn the petrol on and flood it on the carburretor, set the ignition to “Retard”- the advance/retard cable came loose at the magneto end! It was either the nipple had come off the cable or the cable had come out of it’s collet inside the mag, so I had to do a quick strip down to find out.
Luckily it was the latter- I think the cam ring had jammed in it’s housing, then when I moved the lever the cable pushed the collet out of it’s location and came free. A quick re-assembly, tightening the collet at the same time so that it couldn’t happen again and fingers crossed- it started! Pete couldn’t climb up onto the footplate because of his arthritis, but his son Barry had a go and went for a spin up and down the farmyard. It was going great until yours truly had a go back up the farm drive; I put it into third gear and gave it full throttle, then halfway to the top the engine just died. Jumping off I found that the nipple had come unsoldered from the end of the petrol pipe, so it was back to the farm to see what we could do.
Pete’s neighbour, Dave Packer, came to the rescue with a calf de-budding tool. It was really a large soldering iron that you could clip onto a tractor’s battery so that you could de-bud (de-horn) calves in the field, so Barry brought the Nuffield round and we set to work trying to get enough heat into the joint to melt the solder. As you can see from the pictures it was a team effort to repair it but eventually proved successful. Quite an eventful morning and I can’t thank Barry and Pete enough for mucking in to help.
It was quite ironic that the parts that let me down were parts that I hadn’t worked on- the magneto was an outside repair and came back with the cable fitted and the petrol pipe seemed fine when I polished it up; it just goes to show that you can’t take anything for granted. It reminds me of a blackboard in one of my customers’ workshops- in big letters across the top is chalked, “ASSUME NOTHING!”.
How right he is!
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I’ve got a bit of catching up to do this time, I’m afraid. Besides other things getting in the way I have made steady progress on the project, so much so that it is finished apart from mounting the exhaust.
I will go through some of the more fiddly bits that got me scratching my head in the hope that anyone doing the same work can see how I tackled the job.
Starting from the front of the engine I decided to fit a new pipe to connect the air filter to the carburettor. This sounds easy, but I couldn’t find one with a suitable sharp bend in it and so I opted for a longer pipe with a more gradual curve; it may work better in keeping the airflow smoother as well, but only time will tell. It was secured at both ends with wire clips like the original was, not with jubilee clips which are definitely a much later idea.
Next to follow was the oil tank and it’s plumbing; this was something that I was dreading because the pipes are designed with an anti-vibration rubber joiner in them. Needless to say, the original rubber had become porous and brittle and wouldn’t have done the job for much longer if I’d left them alone, so back to the spares box to see what I could find suitable. A length of flexible diesel tubing came to the rescue and I thought that if it was suitable for diesel then it should be fine for engine oil. Do I just put it on and find some clips to secure it? I think you know the answer to that one- NO!
These pipes are similar to hydraulic pipes in that they have swaged ends and one of them has a swivel fitting to screw onto the tank outlet. Fortunately the rubber was so brittle that it could be picked out a little at a time to leave a clean surface inside, so I then mounted the swaging onto a round bar and hammered lightly until the swaging expanded very slightly, just enough to get the new pipe in. Once the rubber pipe was in I then tried the copper oil pipe in the centre for a trial fit and couldn’t get it out again it was such a tight fit! Counting this a success I then did all the other fittings the same way, apart from the swivel which had it’s own tail which I had to use a drift to drive in once the external swaging was in place.
I only took this course of action because the pipes do not carry any pressure, they only deliver oil to the oil pump and then return used oil to the tank; if they were to carry any pressure at all then a stronger pipe and fittings would be needed, and sourced from one of the many specialists that there are dotted around the country. Don’t be tempted to use this method on hydraulic pipework, no matter how low the pressure- leave it to the experts!
Cables were the next priority. If you can solder then you can make a cable, they are that easy; the most difficult part is getting the lengths of the outer and inner cables right, and also the fact that we are not furnished with three hands to hold everything in position whilst you solder the nipple back onto the cable. Patience and care are the keys to making a good cable; you can even use old cables if they are not too worn. That’s what I tend to do- I save old cables that have perhaps got a fray on the end but are otherwise quite sound and they provide the raw materials for making up shorter cables.
One aspect of the rebuild that really got me thinking was the arrangement of the throttle/governor linkage; how it came to me was obviously not right because somebody had added a tension spring to pull the linkage back to tick-over when the throttle was closed. How it had been assembled on the tractor looked correct but it worked the wrong way around- you could open the throttle and it would respond, but when you closed it the throttle stayed open due to a hairspring keeping the tension on the spindle the wrong way. No matter how I looked at it and turned things around I couldn’t seem to get it to work the way that I wanted until I had a Eureka moment and everything just dropped into place in a different order. I just hope it works when I fire it up!
Apart from a few more mundane run-of-the-mill bits and pieces that’s about it for the rebuild. Next time I will have re-fitted the exhaust and started it up (hopefully!).Attachments:
