The Old “D”

    “Hey, it moved!”

     Somebody stepped on a snake?  No.

     A five-year-old kid playing with his front tooth?  No.

     A couple of old fellows playing in the machine shed?  Yes.

     In old tractor and engine lore, to free up a frozen motor, you jack up the hind wheel and tie a bar or post or something to the wheel to keep torque on the engine crankshaft.  Then you spray the cylinders with rust-penetrant every day or as frequently as you can.

     Then you wait.

    This strategy requires patience.  The picture was taken in July 2013.  I’m not sure how long after I rigged up the yard arm that I took the picture.  The daily anointments probably spaced into monthly applications during the cold months. 

     Products applied included WD-40, a Liquid Wrench concoction, and even some automatic transmission fluid.

    I didn’t want to mess with blocking up a wheel, so I attached straight to the flywheel.  In an exuberant burst of optimism, I even connected a safety chain to the upper end of the twelve- foot two-and-a-half-inch pipe I used for a lever, just in case the rust let loose suddenly just as I (or somebody else) was walking beneath the yard arm.  Nothing like erring on the side of safety.  OSHA made me do it, maybe.

    We waited and watched for at least two years.  I began to believe the old strategy was bogus and began dreaming up other solutions. My favorite:  on a cold, cold day, take a torch to the bottom of the cylinder block.  Maybe the cylinders would expand sooner than the piston and the difference in expansion would crack the rust.  I never got to try that one.

    I had already tried tapping on the cylinders with a heavy hammer before and after applying rust penetrant.  I also used a log cut to firewood length, laying it in each cylinder in turn and giving it a whack with the sledge.  Not a whit did the pistons budge with such heavy persuasion.

    Then one wet day in July of 2015, when the wheat was too damp to cut, Brother Harry meandered across the barn floor, reached up, and gave the pipe a playful tug.

    “Hey, it moved!”

     Could it be a figment of his imagination?  It wouldn’t move any further despite some serious pressure exerted on the yard arm.  Attempts to reverse the “movement” were stifled by the weight of the arm plus the looseness of the chain holding the arm to the flywheel.  We had to move the arm about 10 minutes on the clock, from the 10 o’clock position to 12 o’clock position in order to get the chain tightened for the reverse attempt.

     When the arm neared the 12 o’clock slot, it slid through the loosened chain to the floor.  The arm was not any good for torqueing either direction while resting on the floor.

    Other priorities beckoned. The “D” had to wait for a sunny Sunday morning following a Saturday evening quarter-inch rain shower.   We could see the neighbor’s combines sitting idle on a hilltop two miles to the east.  If they moved, we would know it was probably dry enough to harvest.     

      Back to the”D”.  With the east door open, we had good light for our project and we could easily keep an eye on the neighbor’s combines. The arm and the snub chain were removed from the flywheel and a flat bar inserted into the slot in the flywheel.

    With the bar, we could rock the crankshaft and flywheel back and forth the tiniest distance.  The firewood log was handy and a sledge hammer soon fetched.  With one of us applying blows to the log and the other pulling on the bar, we made progress.  By applying the log and hammer to the other piston and pushing on the bar instead pulling, we could go back to the original position.           

     Examination of the cylinders revealed that some kind of cleansing would be needed.  The left cylinder was fairly smooth with only a few rust spots.  The right cylinder was much worse.  The right piston had been farther back in the cylinder and the filthy mice had built a much bigger nest, had deposited a bushel or two of feces and tinkled a few liters of their caustic urine in the right cylinder.

      (Often I think we must look like mice in God’s eye, especially when I approach the Front Range and look at the “improvements” we have made on Nature.  Won’t there be a big box of D-con in our neighborhood soon?  Or has He figured out that given enough time, we will poison ourselves?  There could be a pretty big mess by then.)

     The best tactic for ridding the acne in the right cylinder seemed to be a stiff wire brush on an electric drill, replaced by a grinding wheel for the worst lumps.  A contributing factor may have been a judicious application of Iron Out, a laundry supplement for folks who have lots of iron in their water. 

     After a wire brushing, we would wipe out the residue with a newspaper page and go at it again with log, hammer, and bar.  Success breeds success.  Each attempt moved the pistons further.  With renewed vigor we attacked the rust deposits, and eventually the flywheel had made a complete rotation.

     A little oil in the cylinders and the flywheel could be turned by hand, without the bar.

 

      Then we were like the car-chasing dog who finally catches a car—now what?  We settled for making sure the cylinders were well oiled so as not to rust right away again.

     Woops!  The combines on the hill were no longer on the hill.  Instead, they were kicking up dust on the hillsides.  Time to get back to the wheat field.