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Gotta have a cleared path to my shed…and a front end pic

As most of you have probably noticed, I haven't been very active around here lately, at least not in the Wheel Horse scene. Little over a year ago, the girl I was seeing left, and of course that meant I lost two wonderful little boys who called me Dad. One of the things the boys and I enjoyed together was wrenching and riding the Horses, after they were gone I kind of lost interest in the little tractors, and focused my attention more to the larger farm tractors and antique engines. Even went as far as selling most of my herd, only keeping the two seater, the 753, and Ray's C141. The past couple days I have been cleaning out the storage container to make room for some new engines I purchased this week, and came across two non running generators I had taken in on trade a few years back. Rather than haul them to the dump, I posted them up on FB Marketplace. Received a message this morning inquiring about the generators, ended up being the same guy who I bought a 1067 from a couple years ago. He didn't buy the generators, but he did send me pictures of this C81 that he took in on trade a week ago. Tractor was a one owner unit, has a broken rod but other than that is complete and in fairly good condition for it's age. He's asking $400 for it, but is open to offers and maybe trades as well. Still trying to convince the wife that we need it, may be kind of hard after I just dropped $700 on two engines three days ago

I got this pic specifically for this thread....

Does work on the front-end count?

Jumping the gun… … with some of my true favorites…

Here are some action shots. Thankful for this kid. I ended up sick from my Covid booster and he tackled the driveway 95% by himself once he got home. He has some more to do tomorrow but for tonight the driveway is done.

Thanks for the handful of loaner tractors @WHX??! Glad you have so many to choose from!

More progress. Did some tin knocking and welding up the excess holes. Have the sheet metal strait enough to be blasted & then it will need some final body work. All of the spot welds holding the fender mount and the pan together had broken loose and a PO had bolted them two together. I drilled the pan full of holes in preparation to weld the parts back together. Tranny cases have been stripped and an extra drain port added so that you don't have to stand the tractor on end to drain all the fluid out. Then I sprayed some self etching primer to preserve them until assembled. Will paint the tranny case after it is assembled. End of the steering shaft was badly worn. I filled the worn area with weld and then ground everything smooth. Used a 3/4 bushing as a guide to ensure that I had the diameter correct. Knocked the rivets out of the two idle pulleys so that I can change the bearings in them. Tie rods were of course worn. I will be putting replaceable ends on so I marked the original tie rods to be cut & turned down for the new ends. Everything is measured so the the tie rods will come out just a little short, this leaves room for full adjustments. This pic shows them close to finished.

Only got four or five inches of snow here in the Finger Lakes of NY, so not that big of a deal but I finally got to play with my tractors.

Might as well get this rolling today while it's originator @Sparky is relaxing out West

Brings back nightmares of several bear hunt and fishing trips North of Maniwaki, Quebec in June. 1960s. We used head nets, coveralls, gloves and duct tape to protect from the swarm. One year a young guy failed to seal his head net to his collar, and resulting bites caused his neck to swell to the point where he had trouble breathing. We had to rush him 50 miles South to the nearest medica center. BTW, we were amazed to see the young school children waiting for the bus in shorts and tee shirts. They were all native Indians. The pike fishing was excellent, but fishing while wrapped in netting and duct tape while surrounded by a cloud of buzzing black flys determined to eat you was not my cup of tea.

I sold my tractor to @WHX?? and I gave him all of the information so he might look in the book and chime in here. I do have a couple of old pictures that I attached showing my pump and how I have it installed. I’m not sure on the Kwik Way.

We had a good two days. My wife's first cousin' s son and I are like minded buddies who work well together. He helped me change a submersible well pump this summer, and it was my turn to return the favor. His pump was working, but there was black sulphur goo that had built up and reached his pump.Black goo from the faucets like you see in the movies Maybe you guys could benefit from our experience. My good friend and mentor in things mechanical once described how he saw a plumber clean out a well casing that had filled in by renting a commercial air compressor the size used to power a jack hammer. Put the hose down the well casing and she can shoot a column of water the height of a house. I had previously tried this on a smaller scale using a stationary air compressor of fair size on a four inch well casing, and by fashioning a tee fitting at the head of the well, managed to empty the casing of fine red sand that filled it in over the years.I took the better part of two days, but as luck would have it, I was digging septic lines at the farm in a drought year and needed that water to soak the trench to help out the backhoe..The sand was at the fourteen feet mark and I knew the actual depth of the well because of how proud the family was of having the first drilled well in the neighborhood. We cleaned it down to eighty feet . Amazing .... The standard air hose bubbled away and the little bubbles eventually joined into a big one and a column of water shot ten feet high. After that, the thing settled down to pulsed slugs of water about fifteen seconds apart and maybe two gallons per pulse.I put that water to good use by filling a new 2000 gallon septic tank. You gotta get them at least half full to keep them from floating out of the ground when it rains... So today, For a hundred dollars, we rented a diesel powered unit and gave her the onions.The six inch well casing needed a lot more air volume than my previous experience with the four inch casing I happened to be at a Menards when i got the call about the distressed well [yesterday], so for another seventy , I picked up the necessary 6x6x4 inch tee and a couple of adapters. It worked very well, but the well had to recover each time we blew it out, so it became a game of gradually stripping out the old black oxidized sulphur .It worked well because we shunted all that water to a side ditch drain and the work site stayed in decent condition. wE managed to make the well four feet deeper with all the sludge removed until gravel was seen from the bottom When you think about all the running around for a compressor and what a plumber or a well driller might charge for such a service if they had taken all that time to repeatedly blow that well, we saved at least a thousand IMHO. That makes it a good day and that is the kind of stuff people can share just by talking about the work they do. So my deceased mentor telling me the story about blowing out a well and me trying it on my own and passing it on to a younger man certainly has my mentor smiling from Heaven tonight. on edit, I will mention that the tee fitting needs a vertical pipe out the top of the tee of maybe four feet or more. That way,, you insert the air supply from the top of that pipe and the water exits out the side to be directed away from the well. Sorry there were no pictures as we barely got the pump set back in before an ice storm hit.

I imagine for most of us it’s our skill level that determines it. There’s some guys here with crazy talent that can bring anything back to life! And we have guys that paint rims bright white and dont bother to mask off the tires.

Here are a couple of engine driven models I saw @ the Flywheelers show today. Just thought you might like to see the drive method. Owner said same thing about RPM's and ability to disengage. They both have similar spring loaded belt tensioners.

About 2 weeks "estimated". Won't take him the block until my piston arrives though. Ordered my rebuild kit the Monday after I took the tractor apart. Parts are coming from Minnesota, I'm starting to think that the only legal way to transport goods across the MessySloppy (Mississippi) river is by using Tom Sawyer's log raft and a push pole.

Everything covered with ice this morning and large pine branches broken. By noon, nearly all ice is gone and this little guy celebrated:

@JCM Not yet a west coaster …soon

A couple nice fronts of tractors in WI, and a front of a castle for good measure.

As was said a few posts back, I wouldn't lowball him, but rather ask if he has a minimum he would consider. If he says no, then whether or not you buy it is up to you. If you are happy, that's all that matters. My point is that I will not entertain prices that are obviously high. Tractors here are few and far between, but whether it runs or not is a big part of a purchase. It's almost 50 years old, so I don't point out reasonable things. But at this point you're buying a project, not a working machine.

Some tabbed mufflers bolted to a hole in the front of the shaker mount cradle

I just noticed a good running B-80 for sale in Omaha for $450 OBO. Complete non runners in my area sell for $150. I see this one is missing the tins and air cleaner. I personally do not like the C-XX1 anti-vibration rubber mount engines.. Of course, replacing the blown engine, you could make it good a C-120 solid mount tractor. I just sold my working C-120 hydro for $500.

A lot depends on the look you are going for, the application you are going to using the tractor for, and how much money you have to spend. I personally like to use whatever tire Wheel Horse decided was right when the machine came off the assembly line. For that reason, I am a fan of Carlisle Turf Savers.

I agree with that! Wife and I last year in Maine

I do not like a "low ball offer", however I have politely asked if there is any "wiggle room" Routinely anything I sell is listed at fair market value and I have made some exceptions. That being said, Wheel Horse restorations, if done thoroughly, are not cheap by no means! The hours put into some of the past restorations would never be compensated in a sale. Most of what I do is a form of "therapy". Being retired and half crazy, it's a good thing for me. The Tractor isn't worth that as noted with the blown engine. I would buy it if I wanted it, regardless, that's just how I am. I do not see any big deal in $50 up or down on price, especially if I have an engine on the shelf for the project. Example, I bought an A 90-Special, complete rust bucket!. ($200) Totally odd machine with a Horizontal Briggs on a cradle (which was missing). No deck either. I've since installed a 10hp-k241 on a Kohler cradle. So, yes, I'm upside down financially on the purchase, but the effort and engineering going into custom restoration of this Tractor is both, challenging & priceless, that's just my

WIX 51410 or Napa 1410 are the only acceptable hydraulic filters for the transmission…no matter which tractor. Other brands just don’t cut it

I have some equipment to deliver to my son this weekend. I used my 12' trailer hooked to the 953 to bring it from the back yard. This is the first tractor I have owned that could pull this trailer without rearing up coming through the gate and had the most weight on the trailer.

I agree it does sound a bit high, but given the relative rarity of Wheel Horses in this area they do fetch a higher price than what most of yall are used to seeing. I might try to offer him a little less, but I really don't like doing that because I don't like when people do it to me. Maybe I'm weird but when I set a price to sell something, I set it at what I want out of it, and it really irks me when someone offers less than my asking price. Because this is how I am, I really have a hard time with making offers when buying anything as well. I really prefer to barter and trade with people rather than have any money exchange hands.

The test drive went great. No problems. The kids really enjoyed the ride. They were smiling under their masks. They took lots of pictures of their accomplishment. Lasting memories.

I put straight ribs on my wide Work Horse fronts…

Here is the thing I look at when I see prices of these tractors in not only my area, but also other parts of the country. Yeah they seem to be considerably higher priced here than a lot of places. But it's also not often that one comes up for sale within a half hour drive from my house either. Most of the time when I find one for sale it is 300+ miles away. Though the one farther away may be considerably cheaper to buy, it may very well end up that I have more in it by the time I go and pick it up. Take for example the B80 in Omaha that @Ed Kennell referenced above. That tractor is 500 miles away from me. 1000 miles round trip. If I was to pay full price at $450 for that unit, by the time I drove the old truck 1000 miles there and back to pick it up at 7.5 MPG and going off the national average price of fuel, I would spend more in fuel to pick it up than I would have paid for the tractor. That's before you figure in that I would have to buy 6 new tires for the old truck before I felt comfortable going that far from home, and who knows what other unexpected expenses might come along driving a 41 year old truck 1000 miles dragging a trailer across three states. That's probably the main reason why the 1949 Farmall C that I purchased from my Grandpa 6 months ago is still sitting in his shed south of Kansas City. Paying for the tractor was the easy part, paying for the trip to retrieve the tractor not so much. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when all the other expenses are figured in, I could buy this C81 at full price and rebuild it, and may very well could come out money ahead over travelling to buy a runner out of state. All that being said, I am fixing to shoot the guy an offer on a trade that I am sure he will bite. I have a later model Troy-Bilt Bronco that runs and mows excellent, just had the deck gone through end of last summer. But it is so small and I am so tall that I am one sore dude after mowing our place with it. Thinking about offering it to him in trade for the Wheel Horse. Now I know no one in their right mind would trade a Horse for a box store junker if they were planning on using it, but this guy is a mower mechanic and refurbishes/resells machines. He could very easily get more money out of the Troy-Bilt than he would out of the Horse. so I see no reason why this wouldn't be a good trade for everyone involved.

Here's my gal

I guess at this juncture, it would probably be a good idea to talk about my background and why I do things the way I do. First off, I am retired now, but when I worked I was mostly in the maintenance field, particularly on the industrial side. You pretty much have to be a “Jack of all trades” when doing that for a living. I’ve even worked in a tool and die shop for a period of time, and have degrees in industrial maintenance and machine tool technology. I have compiled a fairly well equipped shop over the years, including mig, tig, and stick welders up to 380 amps, a plasma cutter, torch set, grinders, tube bender, lathe, and several tool chests full of assorted types of tools. Building things isn’t a big problem and I enjoy fabrication work. Over the past five years, I’ve run a small engine repair business out of my home shop, so access to parts at dealer cost isn’t an issue. BTW, that’s not a career choice I would recommend. Too many people don’t respect boundaries and don’t seem to understand the concept of business hours….. Not a situation conducive to domestic tranquility. Anywho, as I said before, I am retired now and my wife is disabled. Social Security doesn’t exactly pay well, so I’d much rather build what I need than buy it. Can’t see spending two to three hundred on something when I can easily modify what I already have for $50 or so in material and a few hours of my time. I just need some dimensions or drawings on the mounting bracket and idler pivot. I mainly hoped someone could tell me if all those single stage throwers were basically the same thing or not. All the pics I’ve seen say yes, but I’m not an expert on Wheel Horse stuff.

Ditto....

Don't think that blade is wide enough EB.

Maybe someday, but I’m not done playing with it yet.

Yeah, we were back packing with out tents. It made for some interesting sights when we sprayed ourselves with bug spray when entering and leaving our sleeping bags and dressing and undressing. Taking care of body functions and bathing in the river were major operations. I do have pictures, but they would be censored.

It sure does. I was going to add 40 lbs to the front but I don't know if I really need it. Jay

That fluid ballast, along with heavier built frame, front axle and CAST IRON grille shell really let these big wheelers shine

Mine is very similar to @cschannuth on a half done project I picked up. https://www.wheelhorseforum.com/topic/68968-ark-500-loader-rebuild-on-a-522xi/?page=6&tab=comments#comment-896001

I would struggle to justify $400 for a tractor with a blown engine. If it were me, I'd offer less. All they can say is no. That being said, the C-xx1 models were some of the best looking tractors built in my opinion.

Same here Dan. I thought I might trigger some blizzards when I replaced the blowers with plow blades about 5 years ago. No regrets so far, the plows are working fine.

Still waiting for a correct weather prediction. Many times this winter we have been told that we would be getting multiple inches of snow. Never seem to get very much though.

I use the Mi-T-M HSP Series Gasoline powered direct drive Steam cleaner/ pressure washer. Model HSP 3504-3MGK. The diesel fired boiler is a must have for baked on caked on grease. I suggest using a degreaser prior to cleaning because it can, has, and will peel paint and warp plastic if held on one spot for too long. I typically use Big Red as a mild detergent or for worse case scenario, I grab oven cleaner for engine blocks, cast iron transmissions, rear ends. All my bulldozers, tractors, combines and garbage trucks get the spa treatment! LoL 😂