Farmall Cub

Super A wrote:
So the unburned fuel would end up in the oil pan, and dilute the oil.

Al

Yikes! That much (potential) unburned fuel must have made it tough to keep oil on the cylinder walls.

spadra wrote:

Super A wrote:
So the unburned fuel would end up in the oil pan, and dilute the oil.

Al

Yikes! That much (potential) unburned fuel must have made it tough to keep oil on the cylinder walls.

From what I can understand, if you followed the procedures, everything was ok. In other words, keep it HOT when it was running. IIRC on the Super A you were supposed to keep the temp. gauge needle on the high side of the green zone, right on the verge of being in the "HOT" zone.

I expect draining the oil was one way IH could insure that less than proper operation didn't do serious damage.

Just thought of something else: JD always bragged on how the two cylinder tractors could burn just about anything flammable. Did they have a similar procedure for draining off some oil and adding fresh every day?

Al

Super A wrote:Yikes! That much (potential) unburned fuel must have made it tough to keep oil on the cylinder walls.

Just thought of something else: JD always bragged on how the two cylinder tractors could burn just about anything flammable. Did they have a similar procedure for draining off some oil and adding fresh every day?

Never seen anything saying to do so, but this makes me think I should open my book and look closer. I have never seen an increased oil level between oil changes, and it never comes out smelling like fuel, so I do not feel as if this is a concern. Perhaps being used every day for a main farm tractor it could be? Potentially the horizontal big low compression john deere engines did better with this?

However, I run a John Deere A all fuel. I've run it on a variety of fuels, mostly mixtures of kerosene and gasoline, and even used oil filtered out and added to the main tank mixed with gasoline. The tricks, you start on gas and you get the engine nice and hot, there are shutters on the radiator, you close them, and you hitch up to something that will provide a good load, not a sickle mower, I'm talking a plow or disc, you need to be working the engine. Basically if its not popping hard you don't produce enough heat energy and the cooling system works too well and you see your temperature drop off on the gauge. SInce the auxillary/starting tank is so small if you aren't in temps and you run on the aux tank you'll run out of fuel quickly, so we'll never give ourselves a full tank of kerosene if we won't use it rapidly.Anyhow, you always make sure to switch back to pure gas run long enough to make sure that's all that's going through your engine, then shut the petcock off and allow the tractor to run out of fuel completely.

There is some carb tuning sometimes as well, its easy to do on the Deeres, so once you're running hot and switch over sometimes it pays to hop off real quick and fiddle with the mixture screw. There is one guy I met running an All fuel unstyled B on E-85. Recall Ethyl fuels were all the rage, pre-leaded gasoline. These things seem to run fine with minor tuning on the ethanol, I would make sure to switch it back to low ethanol before shutting down. And again farmalls may be different in this regard.

All fuel is kind of fun, interesting smells.

P B G wrote:I have never seen an increased oil level between oil changes, and it never comes out smelling like fuel, so I do not feel as if this is a concern.

I'm with PBG on this issue. My 36 WC Allis was originally duel fuel. Never had a problem with the crankcase oil level increasing.

The two petcocks are the upper and lower (full, add) oil level indicators. A different form of dip stick.

Also, kerosene and oil mix, specially when agitated. If kerosene were diluting the engine oil, draining off the part of the mix then topping off with engine oil would reduce the viscosity.

Read the section "when operating on distillate"

cubbrian wrote:The reasoning behind burning distilate (or kerosene) was due to the extremely lower operating costs verses gasoline. I just bought 5 gallons of kerosene today and it was 42 cents a gallon higher than gasoline. I guess times change.

Kerosene here is over 4.00 dollars a gallon...

Allis WC operator's manual says basically the same thing on the daily oil check - actually after 10 hours of operation - drain to lower petcock level and refill to upper petcock level. The weekly check for operation on low octane fuel states to change the oil after 40 hours of engine operation.

Humm. That's probably why Grandpa never drained the oil to the lowest petcock level daily then refilled. 40 hours of engine operation would equal about 4 each 10 hour days. 6 quart oil pan, plus 3 each 1 quart daily drain = 9 quarts every 5 days. 9 quarts of oil would have represented a lot of money to folks living on egg and cream money for household expenses.

I also have a Farmall H with duel fuel. I don't run kerosene in it much because of how much more expensive it is.

I was wondering if you could run diesel in the distillate model? Diesel is a distilled fuel to my understanding.

Some people report running Diesel in the two-cylinder JD, but I would not do it myself. We used kerosene in a JD G in the 1950's all the time. Back in the old days, kerosene was much cheaper, maybe $ 0.15 per gallon and it would not run in cars and trucks so theft was not a problem. Heavier fuels had more BTU per gallon and with a given carburetor adjustment, the engine would develop more power on the heavier fuel. Preignition or knock was a problem with the heavier fuels, so compression ratios were lower for dual-fuel, about 4-1.
Running a dual-fuel model on just gasoline might result in a bit less horse power and a bit less fuel economy. The K-1 of today should run very well in dual-fuel tractors but the K-1 is now very expensive.

I had a guy at a show today basically tell me I was full of crap when I explained to him that my SA used to do that. Some people
!

Hi. We just acquired our first Farmall A.

Body looks to be in good shape: someone's given it a good thick coat of brush paint. We saw it run before we bought it, but when we got it home, we realised some sod has taken the fuel bowl off.

Anyone know what the dimensions of the fuel bowl are? We're in the UK, so getting parts might be fun.

I hope you guys can help. We're more familiar with diesel tractors. The manual says it runs on distillate, but it only seems to have a single fuel tank.

How can I tell if my version is supposed to run on gasoline or gin? (Or kerosene!)

Thanks.

BTW - there are many more stupid questions where that one came from.

KDM wrote:Hi. We just acquired our first Farmall A.

Body looks to be in good shape: someone's given it a good thick coat of brush paint. We saw it run before we bought it, but when we got it home, we realised some sod has taken the fuel bowl off.

Anyone know what the dimensions of the fuel bowl are? We're in the UK, so getting parts might be fun.

I hope you guys can help. We're more familiar with diesel tractors. The manual says it runs on distillate, but it only seems to have a single fuel tank.

How can I tell if my version is supposed to run on gasoline or gin? (Or kerosene!)

Thanks.

BTW - there are many more stupid questions where that one came from.

If there is only one tank, it runs on gasoline.

For parts, I'd try Steiner Tractor Parts: https://www.steinertractor.com/

Super A wrote:If there is only one tank, it runs on gasoline.
For parts, I'd try Steiner Tractor Parts: https://www.steinertractor.com/

I was talking rubbish. In my excitement I just didn't see it! It has a small second tank, which I guess is for the gasoline, but what should I use for the main fuel? What is "distillate"?

Thanks!

http://www.yesterdaystractors.com/cgi-b ... &th=582548

Above, a discussion on distillate.

Eugene wrote:http://www.yesterdaystractors.com/cgi-bin/viewit.cgi?bd=farmall&th=582548
Above, a discussion on distillate.

I'd read that and discounted it, worriedly! It seemed to be two differing opinions. So, do we know if teh engine is designed to run on kerosene, but it just happens to run perfectly well of petrol? Or does it need this "blend" of whatever fuels we happen to have lying around?

This is gonna be entertaining...