Adventures of a Shade-Tree Mechanic

There is an old saying - “If it ain’t broke, Don’t fix it.” – that carries a whole lot of wisdom in just seven words.  That is not to say that normal maintenance is not a good thing, but sometimes it is better to leave well enough alone.

I had a good example of that this past week.  My new-to-me Ford 2000 tractor, a three cylinder diesel, had bad battery cables that occasionally lost connection.   I knew they needed replacing when I bought it, and Friday, I bought new cables and swapped them out.

That seemed like a simple enough operation, a straightforward replacement of bad parts with good.  Nothing to go wrong there – Right?

Wrong!

After replacing the cables, the engine fired right up, but it only ran about 30 seconds and quit.  It wouldn’t even try to start again.

Here’s what happened -

In order to reach the battery cable connection on the starter solenoid, I had to remove one of the fuel filters.  When I put the filter back on, I failed to fill it with fuel.  Once the air from the filter reached the fuel pump, it lost its prime.  Much like a bolus of air in a human vein causing a heart attack, it killed that old Ford deader than a doorknob.

Once I figured out what I had done wrong,  I had to detach the fuel lines at the injectors and cycle the engine until I had fuel flowing again.  

That solved the problem with the tractor, except that by the time I got the fuel lines reconnected,  the battery was getting too low to start the tractor on its own. At that point, I used jumper cables and my riding lawnmower to give the tractor a boost.  It was working, too– I had just seen the first puff of smoke from the old Ford’s exhaust when the lawnmower abruptly quit. 

It just stopped like I had turned off the key.

After breaking out my voltmeter and tracing the circuit, I discovered that the mower has a 20 amp fuse that had picked that precise moment to fail.  It never had gone out before – after owning the mower for almost ten years, I didn’t even know it was there.  Luckily I had a replacement fuse in my tool box, and once that was fixed, the tractor started up on the first try.

All in all, a half hour job had grown to almost three hours over two days, but at least now it’s done.