B6100 w/ Loader+Backhoe

[Vigo]

You wouldn't happen to have some of that removed 3-point hardware/stuff available would you? I've got an equally rough B7100D "parts" tractor that I got in a deal when I bought a B1630 loader for my B7100HST. It seems to be complete enough to justify trying to make it a whole tractor again, but pretty much the entire 3-point setup is missing or junk. All that's left is a seized control valve broken at the handle and the rockshaft splines.

I have 'most' of a 3pt setup on my parts tractor, and i might be willing to do some trading.. I've got to think about whether i will ever make this one operable with a 3pt again. I have some goofy ideas to do something with it but that thing may or may not involve the 3pt at all, so i'm definitely considering it!

That creeper box is a real interesting piece! If it just slaps over a stock trans (which i think it does but couldn't say 100%) id be real interested in trading my shifter and the other bits across to get that, even though i dont know why. It's just an interesting piece..


Anyway, on to the rear of the subframe, which bolts over the axle tubes where they meet the transmission case. 3 bolts per side.

Apparently i only have a pic of one side. That's enough to tell that it's mismatched, stripped out (and thus loose) garbage again back here.

The blue paint on 2 of those bolts means they are original to the tractor, and that's not great. It seems most of the bolts i found going through the loader subframe had this issue. In general it is a bad idea to take most factory bolts out, insert a thick spacer under it, and try to tighten it down again!

Most bolts need thread engagement of about 1.5x their diameter. I think the bolts going through the loader subframe ranged from m8 to m12, so they should have started with ~6-12mm of thread engagement depending on which bolt. Even a 1/4" plate is >6mm, so if you take a stock bolt out and insert a 1/4" plate underneath it, depending on the bolt you either took its thread engagement down by half, or reduced it almost to zero. Sometimes you get lucky that the manufacturer gave you a bunch of free metal in the form of extraneous bolt threads that let you stack stuff under the factory bolts, but.. not often! The people who 'installed' this loader last time around either learned this the hard way, or.. didn't learn it at all and are still out there screwing stuff up to this day. Hopefully the former.

Anyway, i HAD to fix these holes. They were beyond screwed up. I ordered a heli-coil set for this rather large bolt size and heli-coiled all of these holes.

The bottom two holes at this location are through-holes with a lot of extra length/depth of the bolt holes, so with a thread insert in such cases one has to be careful not to drive it in so deep that your bolt will barely engage it, or not at all! That's why the installation tool has an adjustable depth 'stopper' on it.

I didn't have enough bolts of this thread and length on hand so i actually had to order bolts (did that several times for this project) which always feels a bit odd when i have hundreds and hundreds of lbs of fasteners here. But i got it done.

 

[Vigo]

Not sure if i would consider this part of the 'subframe' but the loader's diagonal supports from the towers down to the front frame section also held some surprises.

This is the short front frame section that extends out beyond the front grille. It has 3 threaded holes on each side. These are some of the bolts that came out. Now, all the holes are the same size, but these bolts aren't. Metric bolts are a little different than SAE stuff because they generally all use one of just a few thread pitches, whereas the SAE tends to have different 'tpi' for every different thread diameter and not many different diameter bolts have any thread pitches in common. So with a metric bolt if you have a smaller diameter bolt with the same thread pitch, and it is side-loaded against one side of the hole because your part aren't aligned, it will 'feel' like it threads in but then start stripping as soon as you try to tighten it. Not that it takes a genius to avoid this.. but it is an oddball possibility with metric that doesn't really exist with SAE. I don't know if i ever measured that mismatched bolt but guessing it's m11 because that's another layer of oddball where if you thread an m11 into an m12 hole it will sort of catch, whereas most of the metric sizes are TWO mm off from each other, m6 m8 m10 m12 m14 etc and if you are TWO mm off it's 110% obviously the wrong bolt. With m11 bolt and m12 hole or any two things which are 1mm off, an idiot slapping together misaligned parts with incorrect hardware COULD be caught out. I don't have a lot of short m12x1.25s around either, so i had to order bolts again. After fixing the screwed up holes, of course.

Ok, moving on to the loader towers. One would think there would not be much to talk about with the loader towers, because they're so hard to *$&% up, right? Well, BEHOLD:

So uhh, why exactly was 1 mile of weld necessary on the side of the loader tower? Because some cool guy let his hydraulic fluid get SO contaminated with water, that it actually FROZE and swole and split the loader tower (which is the fluid reservoir). This is honestly pretty impressive considering the only way for water to get into this fluid is through a pretty small fill/breather hole in the top of the tower. I feel like it would have taken at least 2 years of rainfall (south texas) into a reservoir with NO cap on it, to get to this. I cant remember why i ran a flap disc over it, i guess i was thinking about knocking it flat but decided against it.

Anyway, the tower was swollen and it bothered me enough that i was willing to risk cracking the weld and having to grind out and redo the whole thing, by sticking it in the press and mushing it flat again. It didn't crack and didn't leak, but ironically i ended up 'relocating' the loader reservoir later in the project anyway.

I also thought this thing had a bad loader pump going from the noise it made, but considering how much fluid contamination it takes to accomplish the feat above, can you guess what the strainer looked like?

Yeah, turns out the pump was ok. Amazingly..

 

[tsp159]

I have 'most' of a 3pt setup on my parts tractor, and i might be willing to do some trading.. I've got to think about whether i will ever make this one operable with a 3pt again. I have some goofy ideas to do something with it but that thing may or may not involve the 3pt at all, so i'm definitely considering it!

That creeper box is a real interesting piece! If it just slaps over a stock trans (which i think it does but couldn't say 100%) id be real interested in trading my shifter and the other bits across to get that, even though i dont know why. It's just an interesting piece..

Let me know, I'm working on the loader for my B7100HST first and then I'm going to give this poor "parts" tractor a little attention. I'm usually all over South Texas for my "real job".

It's amazing how badly your B6100 has been treated - I cannot fathom how a person can use so many incorrect fasteners. The neglect, I can understand - these machines can spend a long time idle. Using a mish-mash of SAE and metric really drives me up the wall.

 

[Vigo]

Moving on with the loader, check out the damage on these hard lines! I actually didn't fix this, although i did think about building a cover for both protection and.. hiding the sins. But towards the end i got in a hurry and just let it be. It doesn't leak..

You can also see the bow in the bucket. I gave it back without fixing the bow either but im basically planning to just swap him my identical bucket and fix it later. Main reason being i want to take the 2 48" buckets and make a 42 and a 54 out of them, possibly with some teeth on the 42. That's theoretical future talk, so back to what is already done:

ALL the hoses. I replaced all but maybe 2 of the hoses on the loader because those looked like they had been recently replaced. None of them were leaking, but I wanted to nip that problem in the bud right off the bat. When i first put together the backhoe on my B8200 i tried just replacing antique hoses as they blew, but i didn't get past maybe the 3rd hose before i got tired of it and replaced all the remaining hoses all at once.

This WOULD be an expensive proposition IF it weren't for Surplus Center! It has become one of my favorite websites, and honestly they're my favorite paper catalog of all time. It's an ADHD project brainstorming rabbit hole nightmare paradise of endless ideas!

But anyway, they sell short premade hoses pretty dang cheap, so i did all of em. The majority of the hoses on the B219 are 1/4npt male on both ends, and around 12" long. Those particular hoses are currently FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS each at Surplus Center:

1/4 NPT hoses

 

[tsp159]

ALL the hoses. I replaced all but maybe 2 of the hoses on the loader because those looked like they had been recently replaced. None of them were leaking, but I wanted to nip that problem in the bud right off the bat. When i first put together the backhoe on my B8200 i tried just replacing antique hoses as they blew, but i didn't get past maybe the 3rd hose before i got tired of it and replaced all the remaining hoses all at once.

This WOULD be an expensive proposition IF it weren't for Surplus Center! It has become one of my favorite websites, and honestly they're my favorite paper catalog of all time. It's an ADHD project brainstorming rabbit hole nightmare paradise of endless ideas!

But anyway, they sell short premade hoses pretty dang cheap, so i did all of em. The majority of the hoses on the B219 are 1/4npt male on both ends, and around 12" long. Those particular hoses are currently FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS each at Surplus Center:

1/4 NPT hoses

For my B1630 loader I bought cylinders, control valve, fittings, and all new hoses from Surplus Center. Fantastic resource and probably the best prices I can find, even local to the greater Houston area.

 

[Vigo]

The B219 doesn't have 'bushings' at its pivot pin locations, just.. holes. Im sure these loaders were not built with the intent to be used for thousands of hours, but Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was the condition of this tractor.. Most the pin brackets were pretty worn and sloppy.

I didn't take the clip out of that pin either, it just.. didn't have one. If pins DID have clips they were.. interesting.

Bucket uses 5/8" pin at the cylinder and 3/4" at the loader arm. It's been a long time since i fixed this so when i first saw this pic again i thought that might have been a 5/8" pin in a 3/4" hole down there, but im pretty it WAS a 3/4" pin and the hole was just that bad.

These ones aren't that bad!

So, i hate sloppy pin holes. Since i have spent my entire adult life fixing and modifying machines (primarily as an auto tech) i'm very impatient with anything i think i can make better, and sloppy pinholes add a big delay to every function of the loader and backhoe. On the backhoe especially it also removes any precision from your movements because everything flops back and forth. So i fixed pretty much every pin hole and pivot point on the entire tractor.

Since this is about the loader, on the loader i primarily used 'weld washers'. They go by different names but it is basically a thick metal washer intended to bring an oversize hole back down to spec.

These things can be a little pricey (several dollars each, gasp!) but they have multiple advantages:

• They majorly increase the width of the contact area, a little more than double in this case. That means unlikely to wear out again in this tractor's remaining lifetime.
• They don't require a round or properly sized hole in the first place. As long as the hole you weld this over fits between the 'raised shoulder' and the OD of the washer, you can just wiggle it anywhere you want over that hole and burn it in.
• That also means you don't even need a proper drill bit to prepare your hole. You could use a burr, or if you're good you could probably even do it with a plasma cutter.

Every hole on a B219 other than the ends of the loader arms is a 5/8". Each end of the loader ends (tower end, bucket end) is 3/4". I drilled the 5/8" holes out to 3/4" and the 3/4" holes out to 1", each with a stepper bit. Don't even have to be careful!

Making sure the bushing fits.

 

[Vigo]

Minor cleanup. I have found this small belt sander very useful by the way.. this one was $29 on amazon, i think.

Another test fit. Ive seen some machines with a 'bushing' on one side and just a hole in the bracket on the other side, but i dont like that either. Every hole got something on both sides.

So since you have the option to move your pinhole around a bit if you place the bushing in a 'loose' hole, you need to make sure both sides are aligned AND 'in plane' with whatever else that thing pivots off of, etc. I guess i didn't take a pic of it but i did check that these bolts were actually parallel before welding the bushings on.

Part of why i was ok trying to become a tractor necromancer with this thing was because i knew it would be a lot of 'seat time' doing things i wanted to become better at, like working with thicker metal than i usually do on a car. I did get better at welding during my year with this tractor, but these bushings happened close to the very beginning, and most of them look worse than this.. probably why i didn't take pictures of all of them welded in!!

I don't like for pins to stick out unnecessarily long. I'd make them all flush if it wasn't a bunch of extra effort. I didn't do that, but i did buy pins that were barely long enough to protrude from most of the loader holes. You are supposed to keep the pin from rotating in the 'yoke' since the yoke has so much less material and no grease fitting, vs the cylinder end or loader arm which spreads the force out much wider and can be easily greased. I replaced the stock 'indexing' feature of most of the holes with some other design. In many of the holes i simply ground a shallow groove into the surface of the weld washer with an angle grinder, so that a lynch pin would 'nest' into it and keep the pin from spinning.

4 holes i did NOT repair, were the ends of the loader arms. I did not want to hand drill all the way through the solid chunk of steel at each end of the arms and the arm assembly is too big to jig up in anything and doesn't even have any other parallel surfaces nearby.. basically it seemed 'hard' to me so i chose to skip them. I feel only slight shame, but these holes WERE worn a decent bit. So.. didn't fix that. But, i did fix another type of play. Here you can see the the lateral clearance between the loader arms and the tower brackets. This play doesn't seem to be of any importance (to most people it wouldn't be!) but given the play in the pinholes, this lateral play actually allows the loader arms to 'rack' a bit, or become 'unsquare', like a parallelogram. Basically if pulled up or pushed down with only one side of the bucket and there is room for 'rotation' at the bucket and tower ends of the loader arms, it allows the loader arm assembly to twist a bit. It irritated me, and i had a theory that actually clamping the loader arms down to 'zero lash' at tower and bucket ends would make the loader act torsionally stiffer. This did turn out to be true!

I know there are such things as 'machine bushings' and shims, but what i actually HAVE is a whole lot of valvespring seats and shims i got in a huge lot when i bought some stuff from an auction at a machine shop which was closing down. So, that's what i used to eat up the clearance. To provide the final 'adjustment' down to true zero lash, i replaced the pins in these locations with 3/4 bolts which i tightened down to zero lash (slight flex of the bracketry im sure but not even visible when torquing) and then double-nutted the threaded end which i put to the inside so it didn't stick out the side of the tractor any as a 'snag point'. I did this at the towers and at the bucket. It really did make a noticeable difference when pushing or pulling with only one side of the bucket. It made me happy, damnit. Not saying anyone else should do it.. noone should be jealous of someone who suffers random perfectionist urges that add time to all their projects.. LOL

I found the tightened bolts never seemed to rotate in their holes, so i didn't add any indexing features to these bolts. You need a cheater pipe to even come close to what a 3/4" bolt can take, so the friction between the bolt and nut heads on the repair bushings seemed plenty to prevent rotation.

Why is that bushing weld ground down? Because it was the first one i did and i was NOT proud of it.. i could have gone back over it but i never did. Oh well, the next ones got better..


So at the end of the day the loader pump didn't whine any more, all hoses were new or newer, and every pinhole on every bracket other than the base end of the loader cylinders (they weren't bad) was repaired down to original, but to a better tolerance (the repair bushings fit pins perfectly, couldn't even get a used pin started in them without dressing the slight damage at the end first) and on a wider surface so they should last forever, and some of the pin interfaces were brought to zero lash side to side as well. If i remember correctly either every pin, or all but 2, were replaced with new.

 

[tsp159]

Another test fit. Ive seen some machines with a 'bushing' on one side and just a hole in the bracket on the other side, but i dont like that either. Every hole got something on both sides.
View attachment 99780
So since you have the option to move your pinhole around a bit if you place the bushing in a 'loose' hole, you need to make sure both sides are aligned AND 'in plane' with whatever else that thing pivots off of, etc. I guess i didn't take a pic of it but i did check that these bolts were actually parallel before welding the bushings on.
View attachment 99781
Part of why i was ok trying to become a tractor necromancer with this thing was because i knew it would be a lot of 'seat time' doing things i wanted to become better at, like working with thicker metal than i usually do on a car. I did get better at welding during my year with this tractor, but these bushings happened close to the very beginning, and most of them look worse than this.. probably why i didn't take pictures of all of them welded in!!
View attachment 99782
I don't like for pins to stick out unnecessarily long. I'd make them all flush if it wasn't a bunch of extra effort. I didn't do that, but i did buy pins that were barely long enough to protrude from most of the loader holes. You are supposed to keep the pin from rotating in the 'yoke' since the yoke has so much less material and no grease fitting, vs the cylinder end or loader arm which spreads the force out much wider and can be easily greased. I replaced the stock 'indexing' feature of most of the holes with some other design. In many of the holes i simply ground a shallow groove into the surface of the weld washer with an angle grinder, so that a lynch pin would 'nest' into it and keep the pin from spinning.

I am very impressed by this. My B1630 loader frame seems to be in good condition with minimal pin play, but the bucket pins are pretty rough. I might borrow this idea if I need to do some clean up there.

This is certainly better than OEM spec after you're done with this thing!

 

[torch]

Another test fit. Ive seen some machines with a 'bushing' on one side and just a hole in the bracket on the other side, but i dont like that either. Every hole got something on both sides.

So since you have the option to move your pinhole around a bit if you place the bushing in a 'loose' hole, you need to make sure both sides are aligned AND 'in plane' with whatever else that thing pivots off of, etc. I guess i didn't take a pic of it but i did check that these bolts were actually parallel before welding the bushings on.

When I built my FEL I even went one step further. I had a 4' piece of round bar (I used 1" pins) to make sure the bushings were not only inline on each side but also in line with the other side -- eg: arm pivots on the towers and at the bucket mounting points.

Nice resurrection, I hope your buddy realizes all the time and effort that went into that project.

 

[Vigo]

Nice resurrection, I hope your buddy realizes all the time and effort that went into that project.

Thanks. If i wasn't documenting it I would quickly forget just how big of a project it was.


Other things i did to the loader:
I noticed that unlike the bucket on my 6100, this bucket did not have any 'travel limiter' blocks welded to the bottom of the bucket brackets. Without them, on full extension/dump the bucket cylinder rods contact a pad welded to the front of the loader arms which serves as a travel limiter in the rollback direction! This puts a bending force on the rod, not to mention the metal to metal contact on a chromed rod which needs to stay nice in order for the cylinder gland seals to function.

So, i located a 'suitable' piece of donor material from the piles of junk:

I was just using the little punch as a scribe to make some marks for the cuts.
Once i started cleaning the bucket brackets a bit i finally noticed the evidence that something HAD been welded there in the past, but not well enough, and had broken off.

So, i took that as my cue to 'burn em in good this time'.

I actually did this towards the end of the project and by that time i had cranked the loader pressure to 1400+ psi (stock is ~750) and i pushed on these things as hard as it would go with no sign of bending or cracking so hopefully these hold up.

Also, the bucket is slimy because of course all the cylinders leaked. The 4 cylinders are not identical (2 are longer) but they all use the same seals so i pulled one cylinder apart to get the piston and gland off the rod so i could go match them up as the local hydraulic shop.

When i pull cylinders apart i typically leave the base end pinned onto the tractor and leave the hoses hooked up, and just pull the rod/piston/gland assembly out of it. Once i have that out, i need to remove the rod nut to pull the piston and gland off. I typically use my shop press as a big vise in this situation. Since one side of the crosspin tube has threaded hole for a zerk fitting and i dont want to cave the threads in unnecessarily, i put that side of the tube on a block of wood so it can 'sink' into the wood without damaging the threaded hole.

It's a rather large nut in this case, 34mm if i remember correctly. Often i can just use the gland as a 'slide hammer' and bang the piston off the bottom of the rod, but on these i had to stand the rod back up in the press, support the piston with the arbor plates, and press the rod down through the piston. Once the piston and gland were separated from the rod, i took them to the local hydraulics shop and bought enough seals to do 8 of these cylinders, which cost ~$200. I bought 8 because i've been needing to redo the set on my b6100 as well.

So here's what 8 cylinders and $200 worth of B219 cylinder seals looks like!

It's just o-rings and flat 'backer' rings in these things, so my thumbs were still the normal color and didn't even hurt after pushing all these in. A lot easier than some of the directional lip seals i've installed in the cylinders in my b8200!!

So, now the cylinders are leak-free!

 

[Vigo]

Another nit-picky thing i did to the loader was 'improve' the mounting of the handles on the valve block. I want to say this had a bent nail as the lower 'pivot pin' when i got it, but i had replaced it with a much better-fitting cotter pin until i noticed much later that it looked like it would be pretty easy to tighten up the valve handle action with a 'real' pin and some springs to take the slack out of the assembly.


So, out with the cotter pin and time to drill the valve handles and 'pin boss' on the loader valve bracket out from 'sloppy 1/4' to 'better 5/16'.

I like using step bits for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is you always have the option to use the next size up on the bit to 'bevel' your holes, and it just feels like a nice touch even when it accomplishes nothing.

Here's the hardware i picked for the job. A bolt with a long-enough unthreaded 'shank' to serve as the pin surface, some small flat washers, a bunch of 'spring washers' and a nylock nut.

The spring washers are because i wanted to get rid of a lot of the side-to-side play in the valve handles, and while you can simply tighten up close to zero lash with a bolt and nut and accomplish this, it gives you a very tight window from 'sloppy' to 'too tight' and not a lot of resolution in the middle to get the exact adjustment you want.

You can get tiny little ball-bearing 'thrust bearings' like this which would be even better for the purpose.

While i've used them before i don't just have a huge assortment of them sitting around, which i DO have of the spring washers. Just one of the many hardware knickknacks of which you can buy a 150pc assortment for $15 online and have it show up at your house in a day or two. I have MANY such assortments of things. Example:

Plus, the spring washers offer a useful benefit for this and certain other things: You pick how stiff they are. Since they align and stack perfectly with each other, if you want something to be stiffer you just add more of them to the assembly. If you have split-ring lock washers you can do something similar using them as springs between two other flat washers, but that adds a lot more thickness to your 'shim stack' and doesn't work as nicely. I first became aware of this type of spring when i started rebuilding automatic transmissions in ~2006, and at some point found out they exist in clutch discs for manual transmissions too (called Marcel spring in that application). In those cases they are used as a 'cushion' during initial clutch application. There is also a much stiffer type of spring washer called a Belleville washer which you would use if you wanted something a lot stiffer, i guess.

So this is what i ended up with, which was enough to make me feel good about my 10-15min project.

http://imgur.com/ttCpI99

 

[Vigo]

Here's an 'in-progress' pic from around the time i was mostly done with the loader, but before i fixed up more of the body panels and started on the backhoe. I ended up swapping the front wheels side for side (to the wider setting) so that i wouldn't have to limit the steering travel so much. Those 6-12s have a particularly tall tread and were snagging on the loader subframe very badly. After swapping them to the wider setting i still had to adjust the steering stops but not so much. Downside of running them wider is a slight increase in steering effort, but my experience with my B8200 has been that the weight of the backhoe reduces the steering effort a lot, vs for example my B6100 with same FEL as this, and only a ~400lb box blade out back (vs 750lb backhoe for this, 1000lb backhoe for b8200).

Before i could set the steering stops i had to unbend the bent tie rod. Of course the tie rod was bent! Step one, separate the rod ends from the steering arms. These are tapered stud connections that don't come loose just because you take the nut off. The 'castle nut' here is on upside down because you should generally leave the nut on when separating joints just in case there are unintended side effects of the joint coming apart (in this case, not really) so that it pops 'loose' but doesn't pop 'apart'. The nut is on upside down because if you back a castle nut partially off the stud and accidentally smack it with a hammer, you can cave in one of the 'castellations' towards the middle and make the nut difficult to reuse. Turning it upside down keeps the bolt supporting the weak areas of the nut from hammer blows, the nut protects the stud threads from hammer blows, and if you are using a separator tool that pushes on the stud, the nut itself can keep the tool's 'point' from walking off the side of the stud. But i keep saying hammer because 99% of all these connections can be separated with nothing fancier than a hammer, as long as you're hitting it the right way. The key is hit the HOLE, not the stud. You strike the side of the part which forms the hole the stud is going through.

Also visible is the 'roll limiter' for the front axle rotation. This gets adjusted AFTER the steering stops, but it's visible in this pic so i labeled it.

The bent tie rod:

Back to the press!

Stood up the arbor plates, put a thick angle iron across them, pushed in the middle.

Ok, now to clean up those rod ends in preparation for new 'boots' which are actually random polyurethane swaybar endlink bushings for some car or another. I tried to 'purge' the rod ends of all filthy ancient grease by pumping some through, working the joint around to different positions, and pumping more through, but i had to give up as it seemed like i was going to use a whole tube of grease trying to get the grease to change color from black (old) to red (new). I got it to a very dark red and said good enough! Did the same thing to the drag link when i swapped it out during the steering box swap. New grease fittings were installed in all these parts. Did i mention i bought a package of 100 and i think i ended up using ~42 on this tractor, not counting the ones i messed up and threw away?

Put that back together and finally adjusted the steering stops. Turned out the stock ones had to be backed out almost to their last thread, which is a recipe for ripping the last thread out when the stops hit, and leaving your steering stops on the ground behind you. So, i replaced them with some longer bolts to get the adjustment i wanted while also having a sufficient amount of thread gripping the hole.

Did that on both sides, and adjusted the 'roll limiters' on top of the diff housing as well. I pushed the loader as far down as it would go (picking the front end up) to check my roll clearances to the bottom of the lift cylinders and set the roll limiters so the tires barely cleared the lift cylinders with the loader all the way down and the tire all the way up.

I have almost found out the hard way that with lugged tires like these, if you snag a tread block hard enough on an unyielding part of your machine, the tread block COULD rip loose from the body of the tire and that's the beginning of the end of that tire. That's a crappy reason to lose a tire so adjusting the stops for the tires you HAVE is worth the 10-20 minutes in my opinion.

 

[fried1765]

Here's an 'in-progress' pic from around the time i was mostly done with the loader, but before i fixed up more of the body panels and started on the backhoe. I ended up swapping the front wheels side for side (to the wider setting) so that i wouldn't have to limit the steering travel so much. Those 6-12s have a particularly tall tread and were snagging on the loader subframe very badly. After swapping them to the wider setting i still had to adjust the steering stops but not so much. Downside of running them wider is a slight increase in steering effort, but my experience with my B8200 has been that the weight of the backhoe reduces the steering effort a lot, vs for example my B6100 with same FEL as this, and only a ~400lb box blade out back (vs 750lb backhoe for this, 1000lb backhoe for b8200).
View attachment 100633
Before i could set the steering stops i had to unbend the bent tie rod. Of course the tie rod was bent! Step one, separate the rod ends from the steering arms. These are tapered stud connections that don't come loose just because you take the nut off. The 'castle nut' here is on upside down because you should generally leave the nut on when separating joints just in case there are unintended side effects of the joint coming apart (in this case, not really) so that it pops 'loose' but doesn't pop 'apart'. The nut is on upside down because if you back a castle nut partially off the stud and accidentally smack it with a hammer, you can cave in one of the 'castellations' towards the middle and make the nut difficult to reuse. Turning it upside down keeps the bolt supporting the weak areas of the nut from hammer blows, the nut protects the stud threads from hammer blows, and if you are using a separator tool that pushes on the stud, the nut itself can keep the tool's 'point' from walking off the side of the stud. But i keep saying hammer because 99% of all these connections can be separated with nothing fancier than a hammer, as long as you're hitting it the right way. The key is hit the HOLE, not the stud. You strike the side of the part which forms the hole the stud is going through.
View attachment 100636
Also visible is the 'roll limiter' for the front axle rotation. This gets adjusted AFTER the steering stops, but it's visible in this pic so i labeled it.

The bent tie rod:
View attachment 100637
Back to the press!
View attachment 100638
Stood up the arbor plates, put a thick angle iron across them, pushed in the middle.
View attachment 100639
Ok, now to clean up those rod ends in preparation for new 'boots' which are actually random polyurethane swaybar endlink bushings for some car or another. I tried to 'purge' the rod ends of all filthy ancient grease by pumping some through, working the joint around to different positions, and pumping more through, but i had to give up as it seemed like i was going to use a whole tube of grease trying to get the grease to change color from black (old) to red (new). I got it to a very dark red and said good enough! Did the same thing to the drag link when i swapped it out during the steering box swap. New grease fittings were installed in all these parts. Did i mention i bought a package of 100 and i think i ended up using ~42 on this tractor, not counting the ones i messed up and threw away?
View attachment 100640
Put that back together and finally adjusted the steering stops. Turned out the stock ones had to be backed out almost to their last thread, which is a recipe for ripping the last thread out when the stops hit, and leaving your steering stops on the ground behind you. So, i replaced them with some longer bolts to get the adjustment i wanted while also having a sufficient amount of thread gripping the hole.
View attachment 100641
Did that on both sides, and adjusted the 'roll limiters' on top of the diff housing as well. I pushed the loader as far down as it would go (picking the front end up) to check my roll clearances to the bottom of the lift cylinders and set the roll limiters so the tires barely cleared the lift cylinders with the loader all the way down and the tire all the way up.

I have almost found out the hard way that with lugged tires like these, if you snag a tread block hard enough on an unyielding part of your machine, the tread block COULD rip loose from the body of the tire and that's the beginning of the end of that tire. That's a crappy reason to lose a tire so adjusting the stops for the tires you HAVE is worth the 10-20 minutes in my opinion.

NICE posting!

Used car dealer?

 

[Vigo]

More like junk collector! I never sell anything!

I do have a lot of cheap old cars. My car hobby has gone almost entirely on hold since i started playing with tractors, other than cars i work on for other people. The cars under covers in those pics were cars i was working on for friends.

The blue minivan at the end is actually one of the nicer things i own, its an 89 Plymouth Voyager which came stock with a turbo 2.5L 4cylinder, but it has a later turbocharged dohc 2.4L from a Neon SRT-4 swapped in.

 

[fried1765]

NICE posting!

Used car dealer?
Lotta cars there!

 

[Vigo]

^I don't see anything but the quote there, maybe the forum ate it?

One thing Id like to lodge a complaint about is the parking brake handle on these tractors! Look, i know what you're thinking..

And i don't blame you.. but, carrying on, it sucks because it lays basically flush to the floorboard when not engaged, making it a bit finicky to get hold of, especially while wearing gloves. The one on this tractor was actually a bit better than the one on my own 6100 because it stuck up a bit more. Still not great.

So i took a damaged eyebolt with some bent threads to the bench grinder and simply ground on the end so it would stick up helpfully towards the operator at a jaunty angle. It's a bit too small to stick your finger through, but the shape of it makes it very easy to pull up on, and don't have to reach down quite as far to do it now.

Apply a bit of heat, and.. voila!

\

Can't see from this angle but it is also tilted in towards the center of the tractor to avoid interference with the operator's foot. You can see there it's on the very last/tightest notch so that's as high as it goes, and it doesn't hit the throttle pedal rod. But, whether you can still FLOOR IT while trying to figure out that you left the parking brake on, i didn't check. There may be an interference issue with the nut behind the steering wheel during those conditions.

 

[torch]

Can't see from this angle but it is also tilted in towards the center of the tractor to avoid interference with the operator's foot.

Nice, but you are only half done. Lil Foot came up with this, which several of us have copied:

(full thread is here)

 

[cthomas]

More like junk collector! I never sell anything!

I do have a lot of cheap old cars. My car hobby has gone almost entirely on hold since i started playing with tractors, other than cars i work on for other people. The cars under covers in those pics were cars i was working on for friends.

The blue minivan at the end is actually one of the nicer things i own, its an 89 Plymouth Voyager which came stock with a turbo 2.5L 4cylinder, but it has a later turbocharged dohc 2.4L from a Neon SRT-4 swapped in.

Is it a 5 speed manual too? If I remember correctly the 2.5 was a Mitsubishi engine, I got to drive one that had the 5 speed and it was cool except for the 3 foot shifter rod(It was like driving a Vanagon). Definitely made it feel faster than it was.

 

[Vigo]

So i have two turbo minivans. The SRT4-swapped one was originally 3spd auto and still is, but it's a different case to fit the srt4 engine (different starter location) with same basic guts as an 89 would have had. It's basically a mini-torqueflite 904 in a fwd transaxle arrangement.

My other turbo minivan was originally a non-turbo 5spd model, which i subsequently turbo'd with an original-style turbo setup such as it would have had from the factory. Still a 5spd, but now with a helical torque-biasing diff and a really stiff pressure plate.

The 2.5 was a chrysler engine. Previous to chrysler releasing the 2.5 (longer stroke version of 2.2L) they did use a mitsu 2.6L in several vehicles, but never with a manual. I have that engine in a Montero and a Lebaron convertible. I've started building a Speeduino to convert the Montero to fuel injection and turbocharge it, mostly with Starion parts. I like both engines ok.

I messed with FWD chryslers for most of my early car-modifying years. It's not such a big deal now but back when and then if you wanted CHEAP turbo cars, fwd dodges were the absolute cheapest and most of them could be pretty fast for the time on stock parts. The 5spd van i intentionally tried to prove you could run 13.9 on all stock parts (turbo, injectors, computer, stock longblock etc) without a wideband to show what was possible even with no aftermarket. I ran 14.0@97 on a bad launch and called it good enough. I still have the van but that one has been sitting neglected for 3+ years.

Thanks for the interest!

 

[Vigo]

I finally found all the relevant pics off my phone from this build which started over a year ago.. yeah im that behind.

Picking back up from the last pic i posted of the tractor with no fenders on it in post #32... I put fenders on it! The ones that came on it were trash, and the floorboards weren't even bolted to them, which made them pretty fragile.

The fenders on my parts tractor were just fine. As always i tried to find nice matching, preferably plated hardware to put it back together with. The few bolts i never ended up touching on this tractor are pretty obvious to the trained eye, such as the ones in this pic. Slight difference..

Another thing visible in post #32 that i don't think i mentioned is that i added a turndown to the muffler. Before, it exhausted straight forward and the hoses and crossbrace on the front left of the loader were visibly blackened with soot and looked like the hoses might overheat if the loader was left parked in just the right place for a long time. I did this before i replaced all the loader hoses and i didn't want it damaging the new ones.

The muffler on my parts tractor had a 90 degree turn on it which was the right size pipe, so i chopped the 90 out and welded it to the front of this muffler as a turndown.

Some of you may realize how fun it might be to weld on a rusty pipe this thin. Well, i did it. I flap disced it down and it quickly rusted to blend right in with the existing material.