Here's a battery story and a half, but not about a tractor. I bought a silly little French car in 1957, and in 1961, decided to spend the summer with family in California. Left NJ and got all the way to NM when the car just stopped DEAD. I got out and opened the hood and saw a huge smoking hole in the top of the battery. The lead bars were covered with the black goo, but NOT there. I had always tinkered a little with cars, so I got out my tool kit (more like a junk kit--the kind of things all farmers always have around because they "might need that some day"). I put two screws into the lead, one on each side of the hole, wrapped some bare copper wire around them, and turned on the lights. GOOD BATTERY still! Then I had my wife turn the key and heard the solenoid click in, but the starter motor did not run. Right there in the middle of the most barren desert I had ever seen up to that point, I took the solenoid off and removed the end cap. The big copper contact that pulls in to operate the starter had dropped off and shorted out the battery. I figured that since I had a solenoid and a battery, I could just take out the contact, have my wife operate the solenoid, and I'd short out the motor contacts with a big screwdriver. The motor took off like a rocket, and we drove 600 miles that day and night, stopping the engine only once for gas and a meal. In LA, I was able to get a new solenoid/switch and away we went again. Later, I wondered if I could have fixed that switch in the desert. I now think that the contact was riveted to the solenoid stem, and that the constant pulling over several years had loosened the peened-over stem. Truth to tell, I was too flustered to think of this solution and was only too happy to make the little devil run. I am not given to much shouting or jumping around, but I did a dance when that thing started. I even told myself I was a mechanical genius, which is, of course, just a slight exaggeration. I have never heard of this happening, and it has never happened to me on any other car. French cars back then were not exactly considered the greatest pieces of machinery, but I was young and naive, and read in a sports-car magazine that this car was a delight to handle. Well, at least you could reach the parts when they went out. Oh, there was one other little problem. I had put a big rack on the roof to handle our luggage, and the extra load made the engine run hot enough to burn an exhaust valve. Well, you could reach the parts when they went out, so I pulled the head and had somebody grind the valves. When I got back to NJ, guess what? Another burned exhaust valve. But then the parts were easy enough to get out when they went out....... Didn't keep that one much longer.
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Today's Featured Article - The Cletrac General GG and the BF Avery A - A Bit of History - by Mike Ballash. This article is a summary of what I have gathered up from various sources on the Gletrac General GG and the B. F. Avery model A tractors. I am quite sure that most of it is accurate. The General GG was made by the Cleveland Tractor Company (Cletrac) of Cleveland, Ohio. Originally the company was called the Cleveland Motor Plow Company which began in 1912, then the Cleveland Tractor Company (1917) and finally Cletrac.
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