A tractor Story

I thought I would tell this as I wait for all To wake.
A couple of years ago I found an 850 ford in Georgia on CL. No motor,5 speed,good tires and sheet metal. I called and asked the people if they would hold the tractor till the weekend I would pay the asking price. Wife was going to be gone so My son and I made a road trip to get it. The original engine had cracked head and block and PO left it at machine shop. WE had a 640 that we saved from scrap yard and I had had the engine cranked for a minute or so and put that engine in the 850. While going through the parts that came with the tractor they were badly worn even the Spark plugs had double foulers. Got the engine running with the carb manifold and exhaust off the bad engine.It smoked like a freight train. Took it back out and got a 4000 engine from a good friend. Cranked it up and it smoked like just like the other engine and knocked when I revved it up. Called My friend and expressed My disappointment and he promised me that he took it out of a running tractor and it had run fine. Still ticked I drove it out of the garage to take pictures of it smoking to send to him. I noticed that the more it ran the less it smoked, By the time I took the picture it had almost quit. Still knocking when revved but not at idle so I checked the timing and it apparently got bumped up in transit. Set the timing and by that time no smoke at all and purrs like a kitten. Then got on the phone and apologized profusely. What happened was the exhaust was so full of oil that whenever it got hot it smoked till it all burned out.Live and learn.
Ron

Have seen many engines smoke after they had been hauled. Many guys would lay them on the side while hauling them. Then the oil would run by the rings and fill things up.

I bought an engine out of a Ford 960 that the guy said was burning oil after he installed it. I took it home and pulled the head off of it and the whole top end was full of oil. Called him back and he said it had laid in his shop for six months on its side. I cleaned it up and put the old head casket back on with some copper coat. The tractor is still running well. MY one BIL mows his pasture every few weeks with it.

i had a similar thing happen on a cub i bought [ and still have] this tractor was sold to me with the understanding that basically it was a restored tractor, it had been sitting in a garage for 6 years unused, when i hauled it home, i went to running it and it smoked, for a few days it rivaled my kenworth on a cold morning for its smoke plume , i was disapointed in that my "new" tractor obviously wasnt as new as i thought, but after i hung the proper belly mower on it, i ran it and ran it, the more i ran it the less it smoked, today it doesnt smoke at all, im thinking it was possible it was new, and never had been run in after the engine was rebuilt

When I first started working for a repair shop right out of high school we had a small ford (don't remember the model) come in for an overhaul. Boss had me doing most of the work with close supervision. Got it back together and running. Sounded good. Put it on the dyno and as we increased the hp it started knocking. lighter load it was quiet. At this point I left for college and only worked weekends. The next weekend the tractor was gone so I asked what he found with it. He said after much troubleshooting and head scratching they found the owner had accidentally put diesel fuel in the gas tank. Weak enough mixture that it ran ok under light load but as the engine got hotter it started to detonate from the heat. I felt better knowing it was not anything I did.

I sold a friend of mine an H farmall that ran great.The next day he called mad as heck cause he found water in the oil.He said he was going to tear it down and expected me to split the repair cost.I told him to bring it back and get his money back.He said several drops of water came out when he went to change oil.I asked him what color the water was and he said clear.I told him the tractor had green antifreeze in it,so that was probably just moisture.He since has sold the tractor and rarely speaks anymore.

This isn't about a tractor, but basically the same thing happened with a car.

When I was a salesman for a GM dealer, we traded for a pristine Chevy Caprice. Only after we traded for it, we found it fouled the #8 spark plug badly and repeatedly. The Service Department thought at might be a bad intake gasket so they changed that with no improvement.

It got parked on the back of the used car lot and ignored for a couple weeks when I asked the Sales Manager just for the heck of it how much he would sell it to me for.

He replied, "How about $100, just to get it out of my sight?" I told him he had a deal.

I took it out to my shop and pulled the valve covers. There was so much sludge on top of the cylinder heads, the drain down hole was plugged on the back of the right head. Oil had been piling up around the #8 intake valve.

I opened the hole and cleaned up the heads and that stopped the plug fouling, but the car still only got a couple hundred miles to a quart of oil. I built up a fresh 305 engine, and figured when I had time I'd swap engines. Meanwhile, my wife began driving it to work, 20 miles of open road each way. In about a month, the thing quit using oil entirely.

The old geezer who had owned it had just putted around town, and the engine was so sooted up and gummed up it just needed a few thousand miles of open road to clean itself out.

I sold the 305 I'd built for a profit, and my wife and I put 50,000 miles on the car and sold it for a nice profit. The Sales Manager never mentioned it again, and I never volunteered anything.

Somewhere in the early 70s a friends parents bought a late 60s Pontiac that had been the city cop car. The car had always been driven at city speeds. It would not run very well over 40 mph. My 18 year old friend drove it to work and back. It took a while, but his parents were impressed at how well Lee got that car to run. All he did was to put the pedal to the floor.
SDE

I took apart a diesel that had been abandoned due to overheating issues. The exhaust ports were completely plugged. You could barely slide a piece if wire through em. I bet that was the cause. Most folks have told me that its caused by running light load or idle. Never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it.

Aaron

Not a tractor, but internal cumbustion engine, a lot of years ago I bought a 413 mopar out of a burnt chy. Got it cheap, yard dealer was scared to death of a burnt engine, it burnt in the car after a crash, was still full of coolant, I wasn't afraid of it none. Put it in a 67 gtx, it fired right off, got timing and carb adjusted, drove it 35 miles and it smoked the whole way. Well crap, got taken this time, but it stopped smokeing on the way back. Checked the oil, full and clean, the 440 that was in it had been using gallons of oil, figured the exhaust was full of unburnt oil. The smoke I saw was just the pipes burning clean, the 413 ran like a demon, never did use any oil.

This is about a pickup but same theory.Pickup was diesel and would hardly pull itself and smoked excessively.Found air cleaner filled with dog food by mice.

The Country Club I worked at while in College had a Ford 2000 LCG Diesel SOS with an industrial loader on it (yes I know bad idea,the LCG front end really wasn't heavy enough for a loader). It always smoked a lot, used oil and was a bear to get cranked if it was the least bit cold out. There was only one guy on the crew that was carried over from the previous Greenskeeper and he hinted the tractor was a piece of junk, always was and always would be. One summer we were in the middle of fairway aeration and got a couple of days of rain putting us behind. The Greenskeeper put us on 12 hour days trying to get caught up so the course was shipshape for the weekend. Somehow I got stuck on the loader with a PTO powered blower blowing the aeration cores off the fairways, basically running it wide open. After about a day and a half running it wide open things started happening, it smoothed out, smoke went down, didn't have to add motor oil at each break, temperature started running normal instead of hot and fuel consumption dropped. After three days it was probably running better than it had for 15 years. Even mechanical horses need their exercise and on some of the older iron you're not doing it favors by running it easy.