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.