Category: Farm Tech

Gasoline Leak!

Don’t you just hate it when your tractor dies in the middle of a field of dry grass, and when you go to investigate, gasoline is gushing over the hot engine? I know I do!

Gas was pouring out of the air cleaner side of the carburetor and out of the the fitting of the bottom of the gas tank as well. Not good!

I took off the gas cap to see what the deal was, and there an enormous “whoosh” and the cap shot up ten feet into the air.

After finding the cap again, I verified that it said “Vented” on it. You couldn’t prove it by me. What the heck?

The gas continued to leak out the carburetor after the pressure was relieved, but banging on the carburetor with a wrench recalled it to its duty. The pressure must have jammed the carburetor floats temporarily.

Here’s a picture of my tractor during an outbreak of teenagers a while back:

Ford 600 tractor with teenagers

Now I’m down to an annoying slow leak at the outlet of the gas tank, of maybe a drop a minute. The pressure must have distorted the O-ring. This is not an easy part to get at. I may have to take the top cowling off. Grumble, grumble.

So what the heck happened? I thought all vented gas caps were the same — basically a gas cap with a hole in it to keep the tank from building up any pressure (or vacuum). But unless the cap I had was simply defective, this is clearly not the case.

The cap wasn’t specifically recommended for a Ford 600-series tractor, it’s just that I noticed that a cap for my 1972 Ford F100 pickup also fit my tractor. I needed a new gas cap because I lost mine and Ford/New Holland no longer carries them. On the theory that all unvented gas caps were the same, I got the vented version of the one for my pickup. This clearly was a mistake.

The smart thing to do would have been to go to Yesterday’s Tractors and order the right gas cap. They’ve got everything, including forums with good advice. Check ’em out. I ordered the right gas cap and that should be that.

So the take-away here is that gas caps contain mysteries that are beyond mortal ken. Buy an exact replacement.

[Later:] I thought I had the gas tank fixed, but it turned out it still had a slow leak. After considerable fiddling around, it turned out to be a leak in the tank itself, rather than at the valve. I have ordered a new gas tank.

[Later still:] This is a serious problem! I’ve discovered several things:

  • Cheap Chinese gas caps sometimes contain parts that dissolve in gasoline! I am not making this up. Buy a name-brand cap, like Stant.
  • Even with the recommended Stant gas cap, the tank would over-pressurize and leak. The problem seems to be that putting a gas tank directly above the engine isn’t the smartest thing in the world, and the hot engine pressurizes the tank beyond what the gas cap’s vent can deal with. In the end, I used the trick I read about on Yesterday’s Tractors: there’s a spring-loaded plastic button on the inside of the gas cap in the center. That’s the vent. Drill a teeny-tiny hole in it. This gives you a non-pressurized gas tank.

Earlier tractors like the Ford N series had non-pressurized tanks, with a dome built into the top of the tank with a pinhole in the top and bottom to vent off gases. I’d rather have a proper spring-loaded vent (since it reduces emissions and minimizes the amount of gas that dribbles out if the tractor turns over), but I have to select something that works over something that doesn’t.

The safety issue, by the way, is why old tractors have metal gas lines rather than rubber ones. Because they use gravity feed rather than a fuel pump, turning off the ignition does nothing to stop the flow of gasoline. If you ever feel moved to use a rubber fuel line, you need to put a fuel shutoff solenoid between the tank and the rubber, and have it turn on and off with the ignition. Such shutoffs are available.

P.S. Check out my other tractor pages.

iPod Touch: Best PDA for Farmers

Cell phones could have been invented for farmers, just to make it possible to get in touch with spouses who are in town on one errand and vector them off on another — for a hundred pounds of chick starter, say. I got my first cell phone after moving back to the country.

Eventually I’ll have an iPhone, but the first rule of rural cell-phones is, “Use the carrier with the strongest signal at your house.” For me, that’s Verizon. For the iPhone, I’d need AT&T, and their signal stinks out here.

But I digress. I was going to talk about the iPod Touch, which pretends to be an MP3 player but is really a PDA, portable Web browser, video player, and many other things.

With the new 2.0 software release, the iPod Touch has suddenly become a very capable machine. It connects easily to the corporate email of my day job at Citrix Systems, so I can check my mail wherever I am, if there’s a wireless signal. And there generally is, these days. And I’m delighted by OmniFocus, a fancy task manager for the iPod Touch and iPhone you can download for twenty bucks.

The iPod Touch uses any available wireless access point to figure out where you are (this works even if you can’t connect to the access point). This is integrated with Google Maps and OmniFocus. Google Maps can give you directions and do location-based searches from where you are. OmniFocus can give you to-do lists (like shopping lists, sorted nearest-first. Very handy.

The technology for this is based on a huge database of wireless access point locations, that were compiled by having people drive up and down every highway and every street in every town. Wireless access points broadcast their Ethernet addresses even when they have been secured in every other way, so every one of them acts as a beacon. If you can hear just one access point, you know where you are in general terms. With three, you can use triangulation to pinpoint your location. All of this is done automatically in the software.

The process is very accurate — so accurate that if I put an access point in my barn, it could probably pinpoint my location on the farm, so if I’m on the back forty, the back-forty to-do items would jump to the top of the list.

Now, if you’re in the country, the drivers haven’t bumped down your road, so your wireless access point isn’t in the database. But this has been taken care of, too. Skyhook Wireless (the people who are doing all the driving and maintaining the location database) has a page where you can submit locations of access points not on their list. I’ve submitted mine! It takes a variable amount of time for the results to show up. My iPod Touch still doesn’t know where it is when I’m home.

If you’re going to use an iPod Touch or iPhone while doing chores, like I do (I listen to audiobooks all the time — right now I’m listening to “The Civil War” by Shelby Foote), get a rubber cover and a screen protector for it so it will bounce instead of breaking, and so it doesn’t get exposed to too much dampness. I use a ShieldZone Top Skin and have been very happy with it.

Rabbit Resurrection

My 1975 VW Rabbit came home rejuvenated from the shop today. (As I wrote in an earlier post, restoring my 33-year-old Rabbit, which has been in my family since it was new, is the method I’ve chosen for achieving better gas mileage). Its main problem was that it had about a half-inch of rusty sludge in the bottom of the gas tank. This (and the underlying problem of water finding its way into the gas tank) had caused a variety of problems. The good people at the Independent Auto Werks in Corvallis cleaned the tank, blew out the fuel lines, did a partial rebuild of the carburetor (including replacing a clogged idle jet — no wonder it didn’t want to run!), and now the car is running better than it has in years, maybe decades.

An old Rabbit handles like an old-fashioned British sports car — stiff suspension, responsive steering, with a little engine but also very lightweight. They’re fun to drive but can carry a lot of stuff, though I’d take something bigger if I were making a special trip to the feed mill.

In a while I’ll take it down to the body shop run by one of my neighbors (G&R Body Shop in Philomath, Oregon) and see what it will take to get it prepped and painted.

So far, this project looks to be a lot cheaper and more fun than getting a newer subcompact economy car, and the gas mileage ought to be about the same as a new one. (Actually, this old Rabbit gets about 30 MPG, while a brand-new one only gets about 25 MPG). And it amuses me that the car I learned to drive on has gone from “new car” to “used car,” “old car,” “piece of junk,” and “collectible classic.”


“Slime” Tire Self-Sealer Works Great

There’s a tire sealer called “Slime” that works like a charm. On my lawn tractor, the sidewalls on the tires were horribly cracked and the tires were obviously shot. On a whim, I bought a bottle of “Slime” and poured it in according to the instructions, and the horrible tires actually lasted another season with no trouble!

Slime is a green, gooey substance, and some of it actually seeped out of cracks in the sidewall, but it quickly sealed the tires. I’ve since used it to fix leaky tires on a wheelbarrow, hand truck, and, most impressively, on my Ford 640 tractor. Works like a charm. Which is good, because I used to have endless trouble with slow leaks.

On Slime Web site, they claim that the stuff never hardens and can be washed out with a hose if you want to repair the tire for real. I haven’t tried this, but I believe it.

There are several variants of Slime: for tubeless tires, tube tires, low-speed tires, car tires. You can even buy bicycle inner tubes with Slime pre-installed.

You can find this stuff in hardware and automotive stores, and online. This stuff is great. It’s the kind of thing you want to buy on spec and keep on hand.

Love in the Spring: My new iPod Touch

Things are awfully busy around here, and I was looking for a new PDA (Personaly Desktop Assistant, such as a Palm Pilot) to help me keep my act together. I have an ancient Palm-based Sony Clie, but it’s sort of big and heavy, and anyway I was looking to reduce the number of things I lug around in my shirt pocket — a PDA, an iPod, and a cell phone is too many.

I carry an iPod not for music, but for audiobooks, so I can combine reading time with chore time and driving time. I’ve written about this before. I get most of my audiobooks from audible.com, which is a book club for downloadable audiobooks.

I also wanted WiFi access so I can check my email or surf the Web anywhere with a wireless signal, with includes my home and almost any public establishment, these days. (Wireless via cell phone is even more universal, except for the crummy signal on the farm.)

I looked at the current offerings from Palm and Blackberry, and almost picked one when a casual reference made me look at the Apple iPod Touch, the iPod that looks like an iPhone. Rather to my surprise, instead of being a mere MP3 player, it has WiFi, a Web browser, email, and most of what I want in a PDA. It also has a wonderfully conceived and easy-to-use touch screen that’s perfectly visible in direct sunlight.

So I bought one. Problem solved. I combined the three things I carry around in my pocket to two. And it’ll go to one if Verizon (the only carrier with a decent signal on my farm) ever supports the iPhone.

I’ve been very impressed by the iPod Touch. I love it! I bought mine at the Mac Store in Corvallis, Oregon, which is also where I bought my first computer (an Apple ][ in 1980).

A typical use for this device, besides reading email, is to look up information in the course of conversation — what other movies an actor has been in, the definition of a word, answers to random questions.

Apple is a weird company, and when you buy their stuff, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Their products are beautifully designed but have a high failure rate — seems like a contradiction in terms, but there you are. Your unit might fail, and its replacement might fail. It’s the cross you have to bear. Their customer service is weird and infuriating. For example, when I wanted my first iPod repaired, they charged me money to evaluate whether they could repair it, and pocketed it when they decided they couldn’t. My recommendation is to recognize that the product development people at Apple are world-class and the rest are maniacs, and just put up with it. Apple retailers are often extremely helpful and long-suffering because of this, and it probably is in your best interests to buy from them. Besides, my local Mac store had a better price than I found on the Internet.