Making an old tractor new (ish)

Sorry i really hate that machine! We had one as a kid, the front wheels were too small and the gearbox i hated. We got a massey at the moment, but its a bit newer. Anyway the reason I posted is, I upgraded this winter to field flood LED lights. I had full xeon field floods on it, I didnt think the Led ones could touch them. But a neighbor got some, they are made locally, they much much less juice and living in an official dark park area, i can tell you this....swith those puppies on when you cant see 12 inchs in front of you (literally), and its just like turning daylight back on!

Honestly its shocking when you first use them in a really dark area. I sat for ages just staring out the window! Then had 15 mins of...Switch the day on......switch the day off.... Until i started to feel really childish lol.

What I do like about the older massey is the frame, utterly solid. The one we got now has dyno shift exotic gears and electronic everything. The sat nav fuse went and the whole tractor shut down! But I got it in a trade for a small commercial wind turbine generator. I will be selling it on and getting something else, i dont need heated seats and sat nav. I also hate the auto trac furrow reader laser thingy!!!! You got to lift the plough at the furrow ends or it sees the bends as non straight furrows and tries to adjust the plough track!

Nah i am going to go back 20 years tractor wise. Change the oil and bingo a new tractor, or boil the oil .

Little Ghostman said:

Sorry i really hate that machine! We had one as a kid, the front wheels were too small and the gearbox i hated.

Click to expand...

Where/what are you driving through that needs bigger tires?
What's wrong with the gearbox on the MF 1155 series that I need to know about?

It's an all mechanically shifted dual range 3 speed. AFAIK the only minor issue with them was the hydraulically controlled power shift and 9/10 problems with that come down the primary hydraulic system charge pump.

And yes I know. They were built to be as bare bones as possible.

Its just personal taste, plus in the UK they did several versions of the gearbox. its the ONLY fergy in the UK spares are hard to get. From what ive seen i think bigger wheels in general is also a UK thing, maybe we got much softer soil. Here where we are now you need huge front wheels because we got alot of peat bog.

Its a fergy so they are OK in general, just a marmite thing to me.

Back to work on the tractor the last few days.

The new exhaust system is in and as with everything else it made itself into far more work than planned. The left side exhaust manifold needed a gasket which turned into a all day project given two of the eight bolts that hold it to the block twisted off in the manifold and a third was already broke off in the block where the bad gasket was at.

I hate drilling old stuck bolts out of things. In the end I got the two that twisted off in the manifold loose from the block but the old one that was in there to begin with required that the hole in the block needed to be redrilled and tapped to fit a next size larger bolt in.

Beyond that all of the old manifold studs that weren't broken were pretty bad off so I made new ones out of standard grade 8 bolts by machining the heads off and remaking them to have threads on both ends.

After that the rest of the new exhaust parts were cut to finished size installed and welded in place and it's a far quieter tractor now.

I gave it a short test drive to see if everything was working after all the engine related updates and of the new stuff works perfectly but one side of the engine was still cold on the return so now I need to put in a new set of thermostats being on these bigger V8 engines they run a separate thermostat on each head rather than single central one. Once they show up I will do a full cooling system flush and cleaning plus put in all new antifreeze of which the book I have say it holds about 12. 5 gallons.

Glad I buy the stuff in 55 gallon drums of concentrate now!

Now I am onto the three point issues which I traced down to a stuck spool valve yesterday. Moderate tear down of the whole three point system and rear half of the tractor hydraulic systems which took me all day to do just to get a spool valve cartridge out that took less than a minute to get unstuck and working correctly. Hoping to get it all back together tomorrow and do a write up on that.

More updates.

I got in about 4 - 5 solid hours of snow blowing with it this last week and it does pretty good for the most part. The tractor as whole seems mechanically solid all the way around but still has numerous smaller bugs that need squashing yet.

The three point controls sort of work now but not as they should. The valve I worked on seems to be functioning but the overall draft control feedback that translates the control lever position to the actual three point lift systems vertical position is screwed up bigtime. It's either going up or down or stuck at one or the other but not staying anywhere in between like it should Best guess ,without more digging, is the internal linkages are out of adjustment due to either being worn or something having gotten bent when the valve spool stuck in its bore.

Fortunately the three point systems on these tractors have three different modes of operation of which one is a pressure only setting which translates the control lever position to proportional lifting force on the three point lift. With that I was able to chain down the three point lift arms to have a limited up travel and thusly just put a limited amount of pressure to the systems to get the snow blower off the ground as I worked.

Beyond that the new exhaust system has a few leaks that need attention. The left side that got the manifold workover has a gap in the weld on the backside of the exhaust pipe that needs filling in . It's in a difficult to reach and impossible to see while welding spot so the whole pipe will need to come out to get to it. The right side has a warped flange where the new pipe for that side meets the manifold so the new gasket on that side leaks. Neither are major fixes but they take time due to what has to come apart to fix them.

The rear tires have been moved to their proper positions now so the tractor looks aesthetically balanced from the back.

Little by little it's becoming a halfway decent tractor again! At least its basic level reliable usable now!