Sorry we've been off the air. There is still a problem with going online- sometimes it will and sometimes it won't aven after multiple attempts so I had no way of sorting the bandwidth problem.

Daisy May's hydraulics have been an ongoing serious pain.

Daisy May came to us with its owner being quite certain that the hydraulics had worked ok when he bought it so we’ve worked on that assumption all along. There was initially no way of testing them because the engine had a complete overhaul followed by the starter motor having a complete rebuild. When it did finally run the hydraulics were dead. So the hydraulic pump came off for examination and  the oil-ways were found to be solid with muck . Cleaned out and e-assembled the hydraulics still refused to do anything. The valve assembly was dismantled and checked and the top cover taken off and the cylinder, as mentioned earlier had been found to be full of rust with the piston solid in the cylinder.

The top cover complete with lift arms had been replaced at an earlier stage as a shortcut to dealing with the excessively worn nature of the original lift arms (they almost flopped about the bushes were so worn) and this led to a consideration of a mismatch between the new cover and the quadrant assembly but this possibility was eliminated by finding that temporarily fitting D.J.’s quadrant made no difference.

You can tell by now that we were scraping the barrel for possibilities. The first time the hydraulic pump came off a long while back there was a lot of water mixed with the gearbox oil and this together with sludge of ages had kept us looking for blockages as an explanation- I mean when you’ve checked everything over and over again you and it still doesn’t work then it has to be something you haven’t thought of but the frustration from checking everything repeatedly and draining the oil out and putting it back and disconnecting the top cover all of these about five million times was driving us crazy!

On the last occasion of Gary’s checking the cylinder assembly (yes, we’d taken it off again) by sheer luck when he had put the airline on to check the oil-ways were still clear he had his finger near the cylinder and felt air where no air should have been. Of course the gaskets had been replaced, checked, replaced again in case but there was an imperceptible slight depression in the bottom of the cylinder bolthole itself which was not taken up by the gasket- I mean one does quite reasonably assume that the machined faces on a cylinder which had been on originally when the hydraulics were believed to have worked would be flat.

Anyway Gary decided to fit Herbert’s top cover complete with a new cylinder and hey presto the lift arms moved up and down in perfect order!

We breathed a huge sigh of relied and began to envisage ringing Daisy May’s owner that it was ready for collection.

However we had reckoned without this malevolent tractor. Because Gary had fixed the hydraulics Daisy May decided to pull another trick and tried to kill him!

Sorry to stop at this point but its nearly ten o clock at night and I’m going home.

Bob and Laddie's blocks came back last week having had their camshaft journals re-bushes. Its a time thing this line-boring. The age of Fergusons means that they are nearly all or have nearly all reached a point where wear is endemic. Low oil pressure is a complaint we hear all the time and nine times out of ten its wear on the camshaft journals. Unfortunately its not a cheap job but once done the tractor will go on for the next sixty years or more because few TE20s do the work hours which they used to.

Bot the crankshafts were off locally to be rebored because of excessive wear as well. Bob came back with 20thou. oversize on the main bearings and 10thou. on the big ends but Laddie was 50thou. oversize on both mains and con-rods. It is still just possible to get the shells but specialist and of course the 50thou. main shells I have on the shelf are for a TEF.

Gary has finished rebuilding Bob's engine and is setting up the timing.

Why can’t life ever be simple? Harald was supposed to go back on the truck and the truck decided to throw a wobbly with its electrics…Ivan came in on a day off to start sorting it but has not been able to get back because HIS car has thrown a major electrical fault (oh, and just to cap it all my area had a complete loss of electricity last night).

So Harald went back in fine style on Gary's breakdown lorry.

Bob and Laddie's blocks and camshafts were collected from London. Gary has been working on Bob's engine all day. The initial clean took out some of the dirty oil deposits of then Gary took the liners out and then cleaned the whole interior of the block.

As always there are heavy rusty deposit in the water jacket and particular attention needs to be paid to the rim where the spectacle gaskets sit and the areas where the liner seats. Failure to do this leads to problems later.

Spectacle gaskets (a pair of which sit under the rim on the liner) are usually metal (either copper [our preference] or aluminium but the gaskets which came off Bob were a papery composite which is very unusual.