How bout worst find in a tractor?

Every body has those stories of the sawdust in transmissions to cover up noise, any other "baling wire" repairs you have seen?

The worst I have ever heard was from another dealer. They had a customer that bought a tractor on an auction from out of state, they took it to the field and made it about halfway before the rear end gave out. The dealer picked it up and opened up the rear end and found it full of raw hamburger.

Another not so disturbing one we found was a customer had a WC A-C he used for tractor rides. He brought it to us with an engine noise and wanted it fixed right. We found the rod bearings had been over tightened and one was rod was blue. Under all of the rod bearings were pieces of a check they cut up and put in to take up the space, we never found the name but we did find the bank name and routing number!

I bought one time a fixerupper ford 8000 from a bankrupt dealership,when i got it home and fired it up it ran on only 5 of the 6 cyl.
it had fuel in the oil as well.
Turned out it seized a rod bearing and they removed the piston and rod all together and hammered a piece of wood in the crank journal oil hole.
They let the injector just pizz away in the cyl.
After i had repaired the engine and wanted to use the tractor to cut hay i found out the PTO did not work.
When i took the cover off to have a looky see i saw that all the guts pertaining to the PTO where missing, they just left the PTO stub shaft in place to keep the oil in.

I took the POS to an auction and got rid of it,..lost my shirt to boot

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That wasn't hamburger! You may have found Jimmy Hoffa!

I bought this 1030 last summer on cl. The story I got was he was plowing in the fall and shut it off and in the spring the engine was stuck. I bought it figuring for an engine overhaul, but what I actually found was way worse, and unusual. The first pic is as it arrived, the first thing I did was get rid of the junk on the front and the cab, then started the teardown. The first thing I saw was the air cleaner date. This is a 1968 model tractor and you can see the filter is dated 67, yes by the looks of it it's never been changed. Neither has the trany filter. As you can see it also did not seize from sitting, but when the valve dropped at full power. And by the rust, not ladt year, but about 10 or more years ago. You can see the water come out of the intake when I pull the intake pipe off. I've collected most of the parts I need and hope to get it running soon.

(quoted from post at 17:06:19 03/09/15) I bought this 1030 last summer on cl. The story I got was he was plowing in the fall and shut it off and in the spring the engine was stuck. I bought it figuring for an engine overhaul, but what I actually found was way worse, and unusual. The first pic is as it arrived, the first thing I did was get rid of the junk on the front and the cab, then started the teardown. The first thing I saw was the air cleaner date. This is a 1968 model tractor and you can see the filter is dated 67, yes by the looks of it it's never been changed. Neither has the trany filter. As you can see it also did not seize from sitting, but when the valve dropped at full power. And by the rust, not ladt year, but about 10 or more years ago. You can see the water come out of the intake when I pull the intake pipe off. I've collected most of the parts I need and hope to get it running soon.

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orry bud but If that was mine it would make a one way trip to the scrapyard,..mind ye i would most likely not even have bought it

Back in the modle T and modle A days, it was a common thing using bacon rind as insert and main bearing to get by till they could be fixed proper.

Not a worst find, but.....bought a 44 MH rowcrop years ago, seized tough shape etc. a challenge but restorable. Got it running, but had a real bad rattle in the bottom end on deceleration. Pulled the pan, found that the rod bearings had been installed backwards. Put them in the right way, and that old motor ran great!
Sometimes a bad thing turns out OK afterall.
Ben

Probably not the worse, but have a JD 4850 we believe was in a flood. Gauges wouldn't work nor the lights so we checked the relays under that dash. We found 3 inches of dirt that had been painted over. All the relays had burned and the painted over and the wiring harness too. However, they did redo the brake lines and the main computer.

Another one was, and this is just a story I've been told, is a local dairy had brought a JD 4240 into a John Deere dealer ship to have the motor rebuilt. They rebuilt it no issues and used it hard all summer for around 2000 hrs. Come fall they check all the filter. No one had stuffed a air filter in it all year. They brought it back and rebuilt the motor again.

Bought a cub cadet original model from a guy I worked with. Its uses the cogged mower belt and one of the cogged pulleys on the deck had broken in half. He said it was running until the pulley broke then he left it sit in his barn and tank and carb had gummed up. I tried engine. Come to find out, the weights in the governor had come apart and the engine scrambled from over revving. Nice guy.

Bought a john Deere 95 combine from a man that Had done business with my daddy's steel company . Got it home was going to change the oil and noticed the fan belt was loose bought a new belt put it on and tightened it up. Changed the oil cranked it was leaking water .turned it off to find the leak . On the side of the engine against the grain bin was a hole the size of your fist that had been jb welded up . Called the man that I bought it from and he said forgot to tell you to leave the belt loose so it won't push the water out where I patched the block.
Lesson learned don't trust anyone check everything yourself .
Expensive lesson

I bought a Ford 4000 back in the late 1970s. It was a red one with a gas engine, same as a 961 in looks but blue.. I used it for over a year and it ran fine an had pretty good oil pressure. Heck I ground ear corn with it just about every week.

Well things got better and I traded it in on a new IH 1086. A local fellow bought it off the dealer.

Several years after that he brought it to me to overhaul the motor. It was running but using oil. When we dropped the oil pan we found a piece of leather belting under the number two rod cap. It had a insert in the top half but just the leather on the bottom. The crankshaft was OK but w did put in all new connecting rods.

So it had ran that way for 6-7 years that we know of. I never could figure out why they had done that.

Not a tractor, but an army jeep. I knew every part of it would need repair, but when I tore down the front axle the ring/pinion didn't look right. They had used a broken off Phillips screwdriver to hold the spider gears in place. Only one of the MANY things I found on it, but it's been a great ride for the last ten years.

I bought my JD 401 industrial, not running. It had a internal water leak. I found the leak was a pin hole in one of the liners. It sat for a long time with water in the bottom end. It had spun a main. I had to buy a new main cap, and have the block line bored, and new liners. Reground cam. Even replaced a timing gear from rust pits on the teeth. Got it back together and it has been a good tractor since. Stan

I had an oliver with the 354 perkins motor and the crank pulley was epoxied on. pulley was splined on to the nose of the crank and for some odd reason I guess it eventually started slipping over the splines and wore them down so who ever had it before me used some type of epoxy or JB weld and put it back to gather and sent it to auction and I guess i was the poor sap that bought it. not a cheap fix to do it right.

Once I needed a cheap engine for an old truck I was building. A friend told me I could have this old 2bbl pontiac engine in an old lemans for $250. That thing had sat for years with the hood off and no air cleaner. It was stuck. I got it free with the plugs out. When it started turning over, rust blew out of some of the cylinders. We put the plugs back and got it started. It squealed like crazy because the top end was dry as a bone. The more it ran and the oil started to circulate, it quietened down and ran very smoothly. I pulled it out and and threw it inside an old tire, put a chain around it to pull it down the hill and install in the truck. The engine ran great but there was a small oil leak on the front of the oil pan. When I cleaned the mess off it, there was a wad of something that turned out to be bondo. When I poped that off, there was a hole in the pan the size of a #2 phillips screw driver. I drained the oil and brazed up the hole with the pan in place. That engine ran perfectly smooth. We checked the odometer of the doner car and it had only 70,000 miles. That was an amazing save, but bondo to fix the oil pan? I'm surprised it stayed in place after being dragged down the hill. LOL.

Not mine but ---the 3%#@#$% n fords I had to run for the neighbor in the early 1960's. Pulled them for miles trying to get them to start and when they did they were as useless as -------. Ford dealer was continually sending mechanics work on them. Old boy had hardening of the arteries in the brain.

Friend of mine bought an old Chevy PU with an inline 6 (292?). It had a miss he could never figure out. Isolated it to one piston - no compression. Dropped the oilpan and found a broken rod was welded to the cylinder wall (couldn't drop the piston with the crank in place). They just looked at it and decided it wasn't worth the effort. Put it back togather and drove it a another year or so that way and sold it.