1. The Collected What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been Edited by Robert Cowley
2. Bill & Dave: How Hewlett And Packard Built the World's Greatest Company
3. Earthquakes by Bruce A. Bolt
4. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Again due to no Internet connection during the week, this journal covers a complete week. Rather than a bunch of boring pictures of disassembled tractors I am going to skip some of the details. Besides some of the details were not all that much fun anyway. The third time taking a tractor apart may be faster than the first time but it is a whole lot less interesting. By the way, the cat is doing fine and has completely recovered.

Moving a crawler and field repair

Driving a crawler on the wrong side of the road.

How you get a steel tracked crawler from one field to another? Simple, drive it down the wrong side of the road with occasional trips over the pavement. The field was only about a quarter mile from the ranch and a heavy trailer is not available so I played escort vehicle and away we went. It may well be that we were very lucky that a highway patrolman did not come along.

Once back on home ground I had to do a little field repair of the hydraulic pump.

A most frustrating tractor

One tractor in particular has been a real problem. Look back in January you can see where I replaced a destroyed ring gear then split the tractor to replace the pinion. When it was back together we discovered that the three point hitch would not go down so I split it again and rebuilt the lift pump because the lift control valve was stuck. When I left in March the tractor was almost back together from that repair. When I returned a few weeks ago I put the tractor back together and it still would not go down. We think the culprit is loose pieces of metal from the shredded rear end getting in the control valve. I took it apart once again and cleaned everything out, placed a magnet in the oil pickup, and replaced the oil. The three point goes up and down and this week it was put back to work in the field. It put in a full days work for the first time in eight years. We also put in a magnetic oil drain plug and plan to take and clean it out daily for a while.

Massey Ferguson 390T doing what it was designed for.

I had mentioned earlier that I left a string of four dissassembled tractors behind me. Now that number is down to two.