Tractor Will Not Start

   / Tractor Will Not Start #31  
If it's puffing white smoke, it's probably getting fuel, just not enough heat.

Be carefull. It's easy to ruin glow plugs. I did that last year. Tried to disconnect them for testing and turned the whole rods, ruining them. Having a DC clamp meter can be helpful in troubleshooting.
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start
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#32  
Here's an update. We pulled the injection pump housing and disassembled the three pumps. Not much wrong there. We put them back together and pulled the injectors. Same there. We took them apart to check them out and nothing looked out of the ordinary. The ends of the injectors had a lot of black material on them. We cleaned that up. We took the steel injector fuel supply tubes and hung them out away from the engine and connected the injectors to the tubes and cranked the engine. We got a nice spray out of each injector. One was not quite as good as the other two but I would say it is OK. So much for the fuel supply system. I think we can put fuel behind us now. I had suggested checking valve clearances and when I came over another morning my neighbor had pulled the valve cover and was checking clearances. He had some gaps of almost .040". The spec is .010". We decided to pull the head and check out the valves. All the valves were in good shape but we did take them out of the head to get a good look at them. All were worn evenly and looked good except for the carbon. Never saw so much carbon. All the valves were covered with it. Also, the head was full of carbon at the fuel intake ports. A couple of them were half way blocked. There was a tremendous amount of black goo deposited all throughout the head also. We are currently cleaning everything up and waiting for gaskets to arrive. I am not sure if it was needed but we are also putting in new valve guide seals. I thought maybe too much oil might be getting past the seals and into the combustion chambers. They were not that expensive. One of the most significant things that came up though was related to me while I was talking to my sister-in-laws husband. He farms about 400 acres and of course he is familiar with tractors and diesel fuel. He asked me if my neighbor had changed the fuel filter while working on the tractor. I said yes that he had just changed it. He asked me if I had seen it but I had not. I got on the phone and asked my neighbor what it looked like when he replaced it and he said it was all black and full of goo. So now we are thinking that we have an algae problem and that fits with the way that head was all clogged up with that oily looking mess in it. So, we are waiting for gaskets and cleaning things up. I ordered some stuff called Biobor JF Microbicide that I read about on the web and am hoping that will take care of the fuel problem. Once we get it back together I'll post and tell what happened.
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start
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#33  
I noticed that when I was scraping the head gasket off the block that two of the water jacket holes in the block were covered by the gasket. There were perforation marks in the gasket right over these holes into the water jacket that indicated that these were punch outs that should have been removed prior to the gasket being assembled. That's my take. It's my neighbor's tractor. He seems to think that he read somewhere that for some applications water jacket holes will be blocked off by the head gasket for a reason. Namely for the redirection of cooling fluid to more needed areas of the head and block. We are currently waiting for all the gaskets so we can reassemble the head and other parts. He bought the tractor second hand about 12 yrs ago. We are guessing that the tractor was built around yr 2000. So, has the tractor head gasket been replaced by the first owner or was it assembled at the factory that way? We don't know of course. My feeling is that none of the water jacket holes in the head or block should be blocked off unless the gasket is solid in the area of the individual holes and is not a perforated punch out that is still attached to the gasket. Would anyone care to comment on this?
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start #34  
Did the head have the corresponding holes in it.
Often times heads will work with multiple blocks and blocks will work with different heads.
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start
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#35  
I'll have to check that out. Right off hand I would bet that the head has the matching holes that mate up with the block. Let's just say that it does. What would be your reply be then?
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start #36  
I would likely open the gasket holes
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start
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#37  
LouNY,
I checked that head today and there is no matching water jacket hole in the head that mates up with the block. Thanks for the prompt to go check it out.
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start
  • Thread Starter
#38  
We still cannot get this tractor started. We have been trying to get gaskets over the last number of weeks and it is unbelievable how hard it is to find them. We did get the main one though which is the head gasket. We bought gasket material for the rest of them and made our own. So let's go on to the problem and I will tell where we are right now. If you reference the beginning of this post you will notice that my neighbor was running this tractor along and it came to a sudden stop with a clanking noise and the engine stopped. We took care of that by repairing the clutch arrangement. A bolt had come loose in one of the clutch bearing release arms. We are assuming that is where all the noise came from when the tractor stopped running. The bolt looked liked it had been crunched up when we found it in the bottom of the clutch housing. So we put the tractor back together and it will not start. You would think that if the clutch was the only problem then when we fixed the clutch it should start. Right? Because it was running before. Why does it not start now? We checked electrical items related to fuel. Namely the stop solenoid and the glow plugs. Both are working as they should. My neighbor disassembled the fuel pump and checked it all out. He said he didn't see anything out of the ordinary. We cranked the engine with the fuel delivery tubes not connected. So all we were looking at was the top of the three injection pumps with no fuel lines connected. We wanted to see if fuel was being pumped. Each pump would pump a stream of fuel about maybe an inch high. We pulled the injectors out and disassembled them and checked them out. Couldn't see anything wrong. We swiveled the three injector supply tubes outward away from the engine and connected the injectors to the tubes and cranked the engine. Each injector was throwing a fine mist of fuel. As far as we could know this looked OK. So after thinking about this and putting our heads together we wondered about injection timing. Why would injection timing change? We don't know. We just don't know what else to check. However, when we followed the procedure in the manual to check the injection timing we ran into an anomaly. The manual says to remove the delivery valve and spring from the #1 pump and put the delivery valve holder back on with those two parts not in. Then put the delivery pipe back on the #1 pump and turn the ignition key on so that fuel runs out of the pipe. Then turn the crank shaft with a socket wrench on the crank pulley nut slowly clockwise until the fuel coming out of the delivery pipe stops. The injection timing is just when the fuel stops coming out per the manual. The timing marks on the pully should line up with the counter mark on the gear case at this point. We did all this and all the procedures worked per the manual as we worked through them except one thing. The fuel never stopped flowing out of the pipe as the crank shaft was being turned. It should have stopped in the area of the timing mark on the crank pully. So what could be wrong here? I have attached the page from the manual that shows the procedure. I forgot to mention that when we had the head off we found a lot of carbon in there and a lot of black stuff that we later determined was an algae problem in the fuel. The fuel filter was full of the black stuff so we changed it. We also bought some fuel treatment and put it in the fuel tank.
 

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   / Tractor Will Not Start #39  
Did the fuel flow slow down as it came close to the timing marks?
 
   / Tractor Will Not Start
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#40  
No it did not slow down. The stream of fuel just ran constantly.
 
 
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