Ways to pull sleeves without taking the crank out?

We know it is the mains for 2 reasons. 1) when you point it down hill the oil pressure drops. 2) When we bought it all the mains were out. Dad plasigaged it and put in 2 under mains. In a WD45 you can change all the main bearings with the crank in except the upper half of the thrust bearing. Dad did not want to pull the engine just to replace it (yes we know that is bad and throws the crank out of alignment an all that jazz but it didn't gage all that bad). I would say that was done in about 1985. That was our main raking and square baling tractor until about 1998 when I got my first IH. It still gets used some, but probably not 50 hrs a year.

First it is easy to pull the sleeves on this engine without removing the crank or removing the engine from the tractor for that matter. You can either weld a bead as stated below or you can use a sleeve puller. There are other ways as well that I would not recomend.

Secondly, I disagree with the automatic answers of pull the crank or you will be sorry later. You can check the clearance on the bearings without pulling the crank by using plasigage.

Also, if you have been running the tractor prior to being torn down it is easy to know if you need main bearings and crank work. 1) What was the oil pressure? If it is good when the engine was up to temp then the clearances on the main bearings is OK. 2) Point the tractor severly down hill (nose down). If the oil pressure drops, the thrust bearing (one of the main bearings) is bad. 3)Listen for a main bearing knock. In my experience it will be a very low soft thump, thump, thump. You will actually most likely feel it before you hear it. If all else fails, plastigage it, but if the above 3 check ok, then you don't have any problem.

Trust me when I say that a main bearing is not something that goes out fast like a rod bearing. It is something that happens over time unless you have a failure somewhere else like an oil pump. Even then the rods generally go out before the mains.

I have been around a lot of old farmalls from the 40's and 50's and have rebuilt several. I have never replaced the main bearings or pulled the crank on any of them. That is why they make inframe overhaul kits. And as far as turning the crank for the rod journals, that is what .004" under rod bearins are for.

In case you are wondering, my tractors are working tractors that get 100 to 200 hrs a year and quite a bit of hard pulling. It might be important for some people to say that I did this and that to a tractor and it is absolutely perfect, but most times at the end of the day it will not make a lick of difference. You can tell me otherwise, but I know better.

It is possible to change the main bearings without removing the crank. I did that on the first engine I did an rebuild on. That was on an M, maybe an H is different. On my H, I had a non-running tractor with a cracked block so I had to tear everything down anyway. I didn't pay attention to see if you could have taken the mains out without the crank.

Both engines run good but the one that was totally rebuilt with crank turned and block line-bored runs better.

Cover the crank with a wet towel, so the splatter doesn't hurt the crank journals.

Good luck
Erik in WI