We hauled this 1948 Farmall Cub from Arkansas City, Kansas

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to Page, Arizona

View Larger Map during late June/early July on 2008.
Work finally got started on the Cub a little while later, and this is the progress of the Cub, named "Black Cat" in honor of its biggest fan.

Here's Meepers, investigating his new best friend, before we tore it to pieces.

Well, I tried to simply oil it, gas it, and see if it would fire, but no such luck. So I began disassembling things, especially with the help of my friend Jim, who is another tractor lover and all-around great person here in Page. Since the motor wouldn't turn over, we realized it was time to pull the cylinder head, to see what laid beneath.

Pretty ugly! Water had obviously gotten into the cylinders, especially #2 and #3. We put kerosene in the cylinders, and tried to pound them loose. NO luck...

Valves were stuck solid too, so we had to remove them. Again, I am terribly indebted to Jim for all his help and expertise in this process. Sludgy-looking valve area, isn't it?

In order to get to the valves, we also had to remove the intake/exhaust manifold-carburator assembly. Good thing too! Look at all that junk in the ports! See that stuff on the floor? That all came out of the ports too!

We tried also to rock the tractor in high gear, in order to possibly pop the cylinders loose. We couldn't get it to shift into 3rd (uh oh!), so we put it into 2nd (with some difficulty). No luck, and then we couldn't get it out of 2nd! Here's why:

All the transmission fluid had turned to sludge! Nothing was lubricated! We were finally able to get the rods to shift the gears back into neutral, after some coaxing.

The biggest break-through probably came when we were able to move Black Cat over to Jim's shop - he's got tools and more tools, plus space to work (which our little garage doesn't), and expertise working on other tractors, including the Farmall A (a scaled-up version of the Cub). Once there, we were able to sandblast the parts we took off.








Dirty work, but gotta love the results. I work out of town alot, and Jim, Gene, and Pops put in a good amount of work on the days I was gone. It went from a pile of parts (pictured above) to an unstuck engine with all the valves out, and ground.

Got it all polished up, new gaskets, and then I had to leave town for work again. But when I got back, Jim and Gene and Pops had worked some more magic. They'd put the parts back together, and got it to turn over (poorly) on ether. So, I jumped back in the mix, and we messed around with it most of the day before the tractor show here in Page, and we got it to fire up on gas!

These are the first pics of the tractor after it had moved under its own power in about 20 years! It smoked something fierce, and wasn't hitting on all cylinders, but we put some SeaFoam and STP into the gas and oil, and let 'er run for a while. Cleaned it up a little bit. So, we deicded we could get it onto the trailer and over to the show, and see what happened there.

To read more about the Saga of Black Cat, click back to the main page.

A special thanks to Jim and Judy Kitson, Gene Tucker, "Pops", and all the excellent folks at the Farmall Cub Message Board! It would still be frozen up in my garage if it wasn't for all you guys and gals!