Tuesday, May 29, 2007

I fixed it! (I think.)


so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens


For anyone as rock-knuckled and splay-fingered as I am, engine repairs are simply best left alone. Ever since causing the death of a perfectly good 1970 VW solely through an act of preventative maintenance, I’ve put my motorized vehicles in the hands of people I pay to know better.

That is, at least, until now.

Two years ago, my wife and I inherited 145 acres of Western Virginia hillside, and with them, a vintage-1960 Massey-Furguson MF-35 farm tractor.

With 30 or 40 acres of pasture-land, a tractor is a must. Miss bush-hogging one year, and your fields look messy. Miss it for two…and you've got pasture-land no more.

You’ve probably seen an MF-35 if you’ve ever driven farm country. Massey built about a zillion of them – and they build them to last – out of cast iron and thick sheet metal. There are plenty of them still around, since nothing short of a thermonuclear explosion can do them irreparable damage.



“Irreparable” is the key word, since – every 30 years or so – a part will wear out and require replacement. Require replacement, that is, by me, since the nearest tractor mechanic is two towns away…and doesn’t make house calls.

Where is a tractor dilettante to go in his distress? Online, of course!

You’ll not, I’m sure, be surprised to discover that there is a thriving – nay, flourishing – online community of MF-35 owners, collectors, restorers and amateur mechanics, a majority of which remains poised at their keyboards, ready to provide detailed advice to the likes of me, 24 hours a day.

There are downloadable manuals – 300 pages long – translated into Japanese, if one might wish. There are points and plugs…wheels and widgets in stock and shippable within a matter of days. At 40-plus years, this must constitute one of the longest running aftermarkets in the history of…well, aftermarkets.

This, to say the very least, was a surprise. But true delight still awaited.

For the first time in my appallingly effete life, I fixed a broken engine. Not once…not twice…but three times. The clutch and carburetor last year. And just last weekend, the radiator. And I threw in a new thermostat, as long as I had the thing apart. (What bliss those words!)

But for this I can’t take the credit.

For Fergie, dear Fergie, did not once confound my fumbling advances. She guided my awkward fingers to every wayward bolt and secret cotter pin with a frankness befitting a Venus in sheet metal . When the job was done, she purred as I imagined she had never purred for her previous owners.

“No words but things,” old Willie Carlos Williams said. With a waft of diesel about me, now I know what he means.

27 comments:

Neddie said...

Well do I remember that '70 Carmann Ghia! You killed it, didja? Love to hear how...

Ooh! That was the car that was stolen from the bar on Shelter Island, wasn't it? Tell that one, too! I'm all ears!

thestoic said...

Actually, you're right on both counts -- although it was a VW Fastback, not the Ghia (which would have been way cooler, if considerably less roomy).

Believe it or not, the car survived both of the traumas you mention, and was done in only by my attempt to replace the brake pads. I'd cleverly bought one of those photo-illustrated VW maintenance books featuring severe-looking German men in white coats performing precise operations on car parts so clean, they'd clearly never been within a kilometer of the autobahn.

Needless to say, once I'd actually wedged myself under the car to change the brakes, everything looked very, very different. I'm afraid I rather panicked, put in the new pads carelessly, then completely forgot to reinsert the Spolger Pins into the countersunk Widgeon Holes on reassembly.

The next thing I knew, I'd ignited the left front brake shoe (or whatever it's called in German) at highway speed and warped both brake rotors. Fixing them would have cost something like $600, which was probably $500 more than the car was worth at that point.

And the car theft...well, I still can't talk about that. It fills me with spleen, lo these 26 years later...

(And thank you for the blog-couragement, Neddie...)

Neddie said...

And thank you for the blog-couragement, Neddie...

Oh, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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