Snow is upon us and winter is soon here. We had our first solid freeze this week. I have all our hay on the farm but wanted to get as much as possible under cover. Well the old tractor has been misbehaving and did not do it when my consultant was here last saturday. So it has just been stalled in front of the machine shop.

I got a call out of the blue this week from my consultant, I know I need a name for him but I am still working on it. He has been perusing old tractor forums and thinks my problem is a coil issue. He had read several people had the same problem and replacing the coil fixed it. I thanked him and since he is out of town till late next week I decided to replace said coil. I had to look up on the internet what a coil was and then I had to find it on the tractor. It was in plain sight and not too hard to get off. It had his ceramic piece on top with a wire at each end. I am not sure what that was as I removed the coil. I took Gizmo with me and we went to the auto parts store. My consultant told me it was a $20 part, it cost $30, a steal if it fixes the problem. I made an assumption that the ceramic thing was an external resistor. I had to choose a resistor or no resistor type of coil.

Gizmo has to stay in the pickup, I don’t drag him around in my arms, I am just trying to get him used to traveling so he is not afraid. He is starting to settle down. I don’t think he likes my driving as he usually lays down in the back seat right in the middle. The single safest spot in the vehicle in case of an accident.

The part did not go in as easy as it came out. I had to cuss and beat on it and loosen up some more stuff to get it to fit inside the metal ring. I tried to start the tractor. Nope, I forgot to put the negative battery cable on the terminal. I tried a second time and could get no spark the engine would not take off. I investigated my newly finished work and realized I had put the coil nuts on loosely and never tightened them with a wrench. So I did that and after much effort and playing with the choke I got it to run!! So I started the warm up game and kept increasing the rpm slowly. I noticed a few water drops coming out of the exhaust pipe on top of the tractor. Its cold and we just had a severe rain, no biggie. I get the rpms up to pto speed, 18K, and all of a sudden I start seeing this spurting in my peripheral vision. I look to my left and oil and fluid is spurting out the engine. I quickly shut the tractor down. I blew a gasket. I am no mechanic but I believe that when you get fluid and oil its usually a head gasket which means tearing down the engine. This sucks. So we may be selling a parts tractor soon. We have yet to decide what to do but I don’t have the time to tear apart an engine. We are going to start doing our own hay in a year and we will be using a small hay baler that only makes 50# bales so a large tractor is really unnecessary. Unfortunately, I wanted the reach the old tractor provided to do some barn window work. Now I will just have to plan better.

Next year we will be buying way more small bales so I can keep them under cover.