Adventures in old tractors...

Last Friday I drove Gulchendiggensmoothen home with smoke coming off the exhaust manifold from the diesel dripping onto it. The return line from the fuel injectors is interrupted by this ... thing, and the thing is made of aluminum, and threading steel fuel line fittings into an aluminum ... thing, if you do it often enough over a long enough period, is going to bring its own reward at some point in the form of tiny aluminum shavings where the threads used to be. I hate that. I thought that fitting was leaking before because the flair was cracked, which it was. But the replacement line and a little more vibration pulled the threads right out of the ... whatever it is.

In true shadetree fashion, the obvious solution to this problem was to just bypass the whole ... thing ... with a piece of flexible fuel line. I needed to actually get around to doing this, because a) I'm leaving for a week and need to park the tractor somewhere a bit less conspicuous, and b) it's threatening rain and I need to put the engine hood back on.

My main point of concern is that three fuel lines go to this whatever the hell it is, and I can only bypass it by tying two of them together. The third seems to go to the intake manifold, but because at one point two of them disappear behind the engine block I can only take an educated guess as to which is which, coming out the other side. I guessed poorly the first time, and when I cranked the engine fuel started shooting out the ... thing ... and I had to swap stuff around again.

The only way to be sure I'd really gotten the leak corked up was to start the engine, and of course at this point the battery, weakened by most of a week of sitting out in the cold, packed it in. The Jeep does that to me on a regular basis, which is why I'm never far from a battery charger.

So now we're patiently waiting for the damned battery to recharge, and I'm gonna go do something else now.