Long overdue tractor maintenance

 You might remember my 1952 Farmall Super M:

Pictured here with the '98 Ford 1920

Over the last couple years the transmission in the old Super M has been getting progressively louder, this isn't unusual in a machine with straight cut gears. At this point I've owned the machine going on 20 years and I've never serviced the transmission. Dad thinks it's not been serviced since the 1960s when my great uncles quit farming.

The transaxle holds 13 gallons of gear oil so first I acquired the replacement oil which brings up a fun northern Maine story. It's been a little hard finding 80w90 gear oil in the kind of volume I need so I called up MPG (Maine Potato Growers) who had plenty in stock at the best price I've seen. Dad and I headed over but it turned out the computers were down. Well that's no problem, the guy took dad's phone number and said "I'll call you tomorrow." and that was it, we left with $130+ in oil with the promise that tomorrow we could pay for it...

Anyhow it was with some trepidation that I removed the drain plug:

I was greeted by 11 gallons of tar...

Yeah, 11 gallons out of what should be 13. I hadn't run the machine since November, in retrospect I should have started it up and run it around to warm things up.

With the worst drained out I put in 4 gallons of diesel fuel for a rinse cycle. I drove the machine around the yard a little and drained it again:

That stuff was clear only 20 minutes before

This time 6 gallons came out so I suppose I got 12 gallons of the original crud.

I left it sitting open to hopefully get some more crud to drain. I should probably do another rinse cycle but really with new oil we should be ready for another 50 years.

As an aside the factory recommended drain interval is yearly...

Prepping for winter

Had a little spare time the other day so I pulled my 51 year old Snapper rear engine riding mower out of the garage and chewed up the leaves. They had been down for awhile so they were already pretty far gone. I worked from one side of the yard to the other pushing the leaves along so when I got to the other side it was easy to scoop the leaves and grass clippings directly into the compost bin. This makes excellent compost and it was heating up the next day.

With the yard clear I let the engine in the mower cool down a little and drained the oil. I refilled with Mobil 1 15w50 which is heavier than the 5w40 I usually use but won't cause any issues. I'll let it warm up a little longer next year before really putting load on the engine.

I use blue painters tape to remind me when the oil was changed, I like to change it before putting the mower into storage but I don't always get the opportunity. The painters tape removes easily when I do the next change. I do the same thing with the snowblower. Now I just need to find time to pull out the snowblower and push the Snapper back into that spot.

Transmission oil

The Jetta has had a persistent transmission whine since I got it. When I checked it was a little low on oil. Interestingly this car wants a GL4 gear oil. This is strange to me as every other manual transmission I've ever owned from my '88 GMC to my '78 240D wanted ATF. It also seems that everybody has an opinion about what to use in there. Everything from G70 which is what VW provides and is water thin, to 75w90 synthetic gear oil. There are 2 different complaints, thin stuff like G70 makes the trans whine, heavy stuff like gear oil makes it hard to shift when cold.

With that all in mind I decided to do the "2 quart method", a quart of Redline MT-90 which is heavier and should handle the whine and a quart of Redline MTL which is lighter and should help cold shifts.

To drain the transmission that blasted underbody panel has to come out so the car has to be jacked up. Other than that its really no big deal with a big allen socket to get the plug out. Remember on a job like this to always remove the fill plug first, that way if something goes wrong you haven't drained out all the fluid with no way to put it back.

As you can see the stuff I got out is nasty, it smells vaugely of gear oil which it should but wasn't see through, very cloudy. Thinner than I'd expected too. I wonder if nobody had ever changed it and the gear whine was yet another reason the car was donated.

With the Redline in the transmission is much quieter. I'm well pleased with this and although the Redline (I got from Amazon) is fairly expensive at this point I feel its worth it. We'll see how the shifting is when it gets colder but for now its smooth, maybe smoother than before I started but I'll need to drive some more before I go that far.

Still got quite an oil leak going on. I can see where Keith changed the oil pan gasket an the leak now appears to be above that on the back side of the engine, maybe somewhere around the turbo. Its quite a challenging place to get at without a lift. Its possible that this car wasn't using synthetic oil before and maybe by changing to good synthetic oil some seals will swell and stop the leak. I'm not real confident but I'm willing to give it a shot. Otherwise I'll feed it and watch it close for awhile and then get it back to Keith for another shot.