Posted by Aaron Spears on January 22, 2012 at 17:59:15 from (198.228.197.54):
Hey everyone. Here's a real whopper of a forum post.
First, I'm a newbie at this antique tractor business. I'm a farmboy and I've been around and worked with engines a lot, but I'm not afraid to admit I haven't until now had the pleasure to work with anything larger than a four wheeler engine that needed to be choked. We've used only diesel tractors for the last twenty or so years and nothing before that was as old as this 1942 Farmall m tractor I bought is so I have a little progress yet to make as far as knowing exactly what to do with the choke and throttle to make this tractor start the easiest. I've only started this tractor twice since I got it two weeks ago and I'm still learning how to know what the tractor wants as far as choke and throttle go. Point being, it's still taking me a few tries to get this tractor running, and it looks like I've encountered a problem with my manual starter button possibly as a result of overuse? When trying to start, I had the experience I'll describe below.
Trying to start the tractor one day, I was holding the starter button in and the starter drive suddenly stopped turning the engine over without my having let go of the button. The starter drive didn't slow down first indicating a low battery, it just went from full speed to a full stop just like that. The starter drive didn't disengage from the plywheel until after I let up on the starter button. I just figured the engine kind of kickfired and made it stop or something so I tried again immediately and the same thing happened again. That's when we noticed smoke coming off the back of the starter button. My dad tried pressing the button in briefly and there were sparks coming out of it. We just unhooked the battery just in case something was getting ground out somewhere and went back to the house.
Note that the tractor's battery has been staying pretty low on charge. It's got a new 12 volt aldernator on it but I think the battery may be getting slowly drained somehow either that or this battery has major surface charge. At least that was what I thought in the past, more about that in a bit.
So I went ahead and bought a new manual starter switch from ytmag since they don't cost very much. I kind of figured maybe it wasn't really the starter switch that was having problems but since they're so low priced it really didn't hurt that much to order a new one just in case. I mentioned previously that we have a 12 volt aldernator, but I don't know what the starter drive is.
As far as I can tell, the wires coming from the battery and going to the starter switch, and from there to the starter drive all seem to be in pretty good shape. We put my new starter switch in earlier today after it arrived and decided to just try to run the starter drive for a couple of seconds to see if everything was going ok. Well it wasn't. I had my fingers wrapped around the side of the metal bracket to which the starter switch is bolted, and as soon as I pressed in the button I got lots of heat on my fingers which were very close to the two connectors on the starter switch back there. We tried one more time after dad got in position to watch and it was actually shooting fire out of it. It seems to be coming out of the switch itself, as aposed to just having one of the cables connected to the switch spark, seems to be coming out between them. Hopefully I'm not sitting on two burnt out starter buttons.
Anyway, I'm not sure what could be wrong. Does anyone know what could cause our tractor to be a professional manual starter button burner upper? Say that three times real fast, but only after you answer my question? :)
Oh, btw, I keep my hand on the starter drive while operating it just in case it gets hot. I want to know right away if I need to stop cranking, only I wasn't expecting to heat up the starter switch and have the starter drive still be ice cold. Say, touching the starter drive while it's in opperation wouldn't be grounding it out or something and causing this would it? That would sure make me feel really smart, lol.
While I'm at it, I have only one terminal on the starter drive. It has a big heavy wire going to it and a really thin one probably 16 gage if I know my gages at all which I don't. They are both on the same bolt, the thin one is on the outside. I can't understand why I need two wires on one terminal. Dad thinks that wire leads to the ignition switch as well as the starter button. Why is that thin wire there? I really can't make sense of it. Especially why it seems to go to the ignition switch too, as trying to run the starter without the ignition switch pulled out still turns the starter drive over as before, I know because I forgot to pull it out once.
Are these starter buttons capable of throughputting 12 volts?
Oh, and I said I'd talk more about the battery. I should buy a new battery for it, because this one doesn't say how many cold cranking amps it has on it but it is a 12 volt battery lol. Anyway, it kept going low on us. We would run the tractor for a while and shut it off and leave it in the shed for a couple of days and then come back out to mess around with the tractor and run it some more. Problem was, we would have a low battery by then, the starter drive would just barely crank over. When we burnt up the starter button we had just charged the battery completely in the garage and put it right back on the tractor again and tried starting immediately. The starter drive ran way faster than before but well you readers of this horribly long post know what didn't work so well. But as I mentioned we unhooked the battery after we fried the starter button the first time just in case it was being ground out. So today when we put in the new button we had to hook the battery up again. The reason I'm saying this is because the battery still seemed to have the same amount of charge as it had had when the first starter button went bye bye, and that was a week later. Do you all think something is actually getting ground out somewhere and draining my battery and possibly the same thing is smoking starter buttons left and right?
Ok, I know, long post. Sorry everyone. I sure like this hobby though and I want to do it as properly as I can manage.
Speaking of proper, today when we cooked the second starter button, just out of interest for you enthusiasts, the engine tried to start after only one compression stroke, in other words, the starter hadn't really even gotten up to full speed before the engine was firing, and I had not closed the choke because I really wasn't actually trying to get the engine running. Now I call that pretty amazing for a 70 year old engine. It always seems to fire off a few cylinder loads, then die, making you have to just keep on starting it a few times over and over until it stays running. Any idea what's going on? The governor is operating at idle, could it be that it's drawing plenty of gas until it starts owing to the fact that the governor would be all the way open but it's losing prime when the governor closes after the engine rpm's reach idle speed causing it to die?
Ok, I wonder if my first post on this forum was like the longest ever posted her or anything.
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