Shop Manuals as Literature

rScotty · Jun 18, 2019

Does anyone else just enjoy looking through shop and repair manuals?
Simply for the pure pleasure of of seeing how things are designed and explained?
Hopefully I'm not alone in this,.... or am I?? Naw, couldn't be....

Anyway, coming to our house this week is a new (used) ebay copy of a shop & repair manual for a JD4020.
Now the 4020 really is special. It iis a tractor that is destined to become as iconic as any that JD ever made....and it's also a tractor that we will probably never own.

But there's got to be a lot of entertainment in looking through 500+ pages full of pictures and diagrams of gears and gasketry.
Did you know that they had a 4wd option on that tractor? I wonder how that worked??? Afterall, that front axle had to have been designed back before the modern bevel gear drive type of front axle became so popular.....

I can't wait!
rScotty

Industrial Toys · Jun 18, 2019

Sure. Take it to the beach. Jut don't get too excited over the gasketry pictures. It's a family beach after all.

I should talk. Watched a one hour plus video last week on how a step by step telephone line selector relay works.

RickB · Jun 18, 2019

rScotty said:
Does anyone else just enjoy looking through shop and repair manuals?
Simply for the pure pleasure of of seeing how things are designed and explained?
Hopefully I'm not alone in this,.... or am I?? Naw, couldn't be....

Anyway, coming to our house this week is a new (used) ebay copy of a shop & repair manual for a JD4020.
Now the 4020 really is special. It iis a tractor that is destined to become as iconic as any that JD ever made....and it's also a tractor that we will probably never own.

But there's got to be a lot of entertainment in looking through 500+ pages full of pictures and diagrams of gears and gasketry.
Did you know that they had a 4wd option on that tractor? I wonder how that worked??? Afterall, that front axle had to have been designed back before the modern bevel gear drive type of front axle became so popular.....

I can't wait!
rScotty

4020痴 did not have factory MFD. they were optioned with hydraulic powered front wheel drive. It was not a raging success.
Oliver was the first domestic tractor with a successful factory fitted MFD axle.

rScotty · Jun 26, 2019

The JD 4020 technical service manual has arrived! In fact it arrived last week and I just took a quick look before putting it on the shelf to read in turn.
My copy is not a JD tech publication, but a a reprint by "Tradition Forge" in Brookfield, Mo. The quality is good....maybe even excellent. Good reproduction on the photos - although photos are always kind of poor & grainy on older tech. manuals. I wonder why that is? They didn't have to be that way. I've seen good photo printing from that era.

The reprint does preserve the quality of the hand-drawn art work done on cutaways views and exploded diagrams that make these old service manuals so easy to follow. JD always had some of the best artists for their tech manuals. About the only better drawings I've run across were in a few of the of the US Yanmar "YM" series shop manuals. Anyway, the reproduction of these old exploded drawings by Tradition Forge is top notch.

A bonus is that where the original artists used different colored inks on their exploded diagrams to indicate things like fluid pathways, the reprint has reproduced these these in full color. That's nice...

I gather that what RickB is saying in the message above is that the 4wd for the 4020 was not actually a JD part?? So maybe it was an aftermarket option made by someone else?
Well, shucks, if that's so, I guess I'll have to find a separate shop manual for that hydraulically-driven front axle.....Hydraulic drive has it's own fascination and a few problems. It'll be interesting to see how the old time designers handled those.
rScotty