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John (UK)
06-29-2006 09:09:32
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Re: John(UK) in reply to Bob Prentice, 06-28-2006 18:35:19
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Well J2 posted my old mail so there you have it really, nothing much more to say to that, ask if you want to know anything. I was a Service Engineer and I travelled around in my small truck well panel van actually mostly although I did have a truck for a while but it wasn't ideal in bad weather. I got my worksheets in a morning, got whatever parts I thought I would need for the day from the parts dept. and off I would toddle. Of course here our farms aren't spread as far apart as yours (USA & Canada)but I could do at least 80 miles a day just on one job, I could get through as many as 6 or 7 jobs in a day just depends on what they were.We used to get a lot of battery terminal problems in those days especially on the diesels, so you may only be about 10 or 15 mins doing the work, you could spend more time travelling than working. The beauty of the TE20 and the TO20/30 is that when you take the phone call and the customer told you the problem he was having you knew instantly what was wrong, the problems we did get was that the customer couldn't put it into words what was happening, we get that here occasionally. Mostly I did just the quick repair jobs,(anything less than 3 hours) like clutches, axle-shafts, hydraulics, cooling system, fit lighting sets, if they needed a valve grind we had exchange cylinder heads and we took one off and put another one on so there was as little down time as possible. Also used to fit cabs too and loaders on site, although we did have a guy who did nothing else.We also did a lot of Industrial tractors working in factories, on canals pulling barges(vineyard tractors),a lot of Parks dept. For the bigger jobs we used to take the tractors back to the workshop so it wouldn't tie us up at one place for a long period of time, but if things were slack like winter time we did fit liners and pistons (23c) and grind the valves on site, we could do the same work outside faster than the workshops could and they had all the fancy equipment to help them. We could change a clutch on a TEA in 1-1/2hours comfortably, best time was 1 hour and 5 mins it depends on how easy you can get the engine back in. The diesels were bad as they were very heavy to handle and the Perkins had a very heavy flywheel. We converted a lot of TEA's from gas and fitted a Perkins P3 engine for economy. Once you know the tractor the jobs are easy, I still picture in my mind what I have to do when some one asks me a question. I ran the parts dept. for about five years too. The problems you guys get mostly we didn't get,just some of them, it will be the age telling now I suppose. We had TVO (TED) tractors which are the same as the TEA, but start on gas and then when its hot you switch on to this cheap fuel, that was ok providing they let it get hot if they didn't they would foul the plugs and sometimes they would carry on using it like that till we got there and you would find the oil pan full of this TVO so the oil was like water, you can imagine what that did to the bearings etc. Even back then we had people who wouldn't change the oil in the back end, I suppose it was too costly, well that is what they said, they didn't think it was so costly when we had to change the Pump etc. because they had worn it out pumping all kinds of old crud around and around. Then the 35 and 65 were introduced and they weren't quite the same a little more complex and not as quick to work on.So there you are a very brief potted version of what I have done (very brief)
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