[rhulad]

Everyone should get a welder when they graduate.

[Adjutant Stormy~]

I really want to own my own forge.

Someday....

[Macros]

that is the dream adj!

[rhulad]

I thought about building one in my back yard, but I'm not sure how my wife (or the man aka county) would feel about that. Probably would not end well.

[cerveza_fiesta]

depends...how rural are you? spent 200bucks on it last night. new battery, some funnels and a grease gun. im kinda pissed about the battery. i'm guessing he swapped it on me before delivery with an old one. Ah well...now it cranks like a champ and i cant wait todo some filter changing and lubing

[rhulad]

I live in a city now. Not ideal for having a forge in the back yard... Even if it was small I'm not sure what kind of permit that it would require. I have a fire permit for an open pit... but I don't think that that would cover it.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Well I am now truly a man.

On the weekend I bought some HyTran oil, some motor oil, fuel filter, oil filter, a grease gun and some multipurpose lube. I changed the important fluids in my tractor, swapped out the filters and lubed up the pivot joints.

Then me and some buddies got drunk and shoveled snow around the yard. That pesky snowbank was an affront to my very being. Now it is no more.

My neighbours must love me too. 4Cyl diesel winding out for 4 straight hours right next door. Good thing I'm rural and not in some sissy subdivision with noise by-laws and stupid useless crap like that.

[rhulad]

Well played. If they complain, remember it is only because of tractor envy.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Well, sorry to be a thread resurrector, but there have been developments.

Last year when I installed the roll bar (of my own construction) I had to remove the tires. Upon removal I realized those tires needed to be changed...which I did. $1000 bucks ligther while reinstalling them, my buddy who was helping me pointed out that the rear axle bearings were pretty sloppy, and given the amount of water in the hydraulic fluid it was likely that the seals were bad.

I said fuck it, too late in the year to worry about it. Now that spring has arrived and it will soon be time to dig stuff, I decided to have a look again. The bearings are REALLY sloppy now. Time to take on the task of swapping the bearings.

This necessitated removing the entire hydraulic reservoir and attachment lift assembly off the back of the tractor (with an engine hoist no less! cool!), leaking several gallons of oil all over the floor, and gaining access to the final drive gears. The axle bolts would not budge easily and I had to remove the PTO shaft to get a socket on the retaining bolts. Of course then the axle still wouldn't budge and I had to take the whole axle carrier, inner bearing and that giant gear off to finally expose the bearing I want to change. Hours of work...and it's still only one side.

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will update later. I need to find somebody with a press to get the damn bearing off now.

[Gust Hubb]

It's like surgery, for tractors...

I know a good pathologist.

[amphibian]

I would help with lifting things, but I would be completely up shit creek if you asked me to point to a sloppy bearing that wasn't a clumsy ursa major bopping around.

Good process of discovery. My father told a story of his farming village in Nepal buying a Russian tractor, only to find out they'd swapped half the parts out for old, broken ones and the villagers were too cheap or not knowledgeable enough to get the parts to fix them, so it sat there for years unused. You moving a snowbank is way better than that already.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Well, I knew when I bought it...being of 1962 manufacture, that I was going to have to do some work on it myself. It's hardly ideal, but if I really needed ultimate reliability I would have just financed a new kubota or something.

Sloppy bearings are easy to spot. Easiest way is to listen. If you hear grinding, that's bad. You can spot a "on it's way out bearing" with the wheel removed. Just reef back and forth on the wheel hub. If it moves and clunks around, then the bearings are bad. If it wiggles just a teensy weensy bit (or not at all) then the bearings are good.

Problem with bearings is they last forever, but once they start to deteriorate, they deteriorate pretty fast, and if you don't notice or ignore the problem then you end up with broken shafts, axles and all manner of awful, expensive outcomes.

To do it all again I think would be relatively easy actually. The "discovery" part of it is what takes all the time. Knowing what I know now I think I could probably cut the time down by half, just knowing what tools I'd need in place at what time.

Located a press. It's handy having a buddy who is a highschool automotive shop teacher. The schools always have really nice equipment that barely gets used.

[amphibian]

I'm deaf, so I'd have to get someone else to listen - which I already do for the car or anything that would be bad if broken or missed. Airport/train announcements are the most usual culprits.

[cerveza_fiesta]

TRACTOR IS FIXED

I was digging shit in the yard with it yesterday.

Discovered several new problems, and 200 bucks worth of springs, bearings, hoses and fittings later, it is reassembled and working like a champ. I still need to reattach the cosmetic stuff, but the important bits are all there. Hopefully this fixes my water infiltration issues, but we'll see. Next spring I'm ripping apart the transmission to replace seals and bearings in there. Should be fun!