Project David Brown #2

The first week of the new year has seen a flurry of activity. The Wall in the garage is finished and 2 extra sockets are installed and wired up.

There's also been more progress on the old David Brown, albeit, not all of it positive.

Since the last report I continued by taking the sump off for a good look from underneath, not so good, rust in the bores under the pistons as well. A quick scrape with a screw driver and a polish with 800 wet and dry cleans the rust off OK and leaves the bores looking pretty good. Typically one can't get to the bores under the piston.

Next step was filling the pistons with penetrating oil. This didn't help much and only found it's way past No.2 the other 2 remaining dry underneath.

This evening I plugged in the engine heater and, to my pleasant surprise, this works a treat and heated the block up so that you could hardly touch it. Still no joy.

Facing the inevitable, I have removed all three bearing caps with the intention of pushing each piston out on it's own. All shells and the crankshaft are in good condition so, hopefully these will be re-usable.

Working from underneath with a block of wood and a large hammer I have managed to remove no 2 piston, Good... No.1 and No.3 are still stuck solid so I still havn't been able to rotate the crank even the tinyest amount, bad.... With a little careful persausion I managed to free up 2 of the 4 rings on NO.2, these look to be OK, with a little more persuasion, I managed to break the third ring on No.2, Bugger...

So the list of parts required now looks like this.

1: Head Gasket Set
2: New Rings
3: Sump Gasket
4: Clutch

Understandably my financial controller has reservations about my using large amounts of cash on this project. I wil be trying to avoid adding too much more to that list.... More pictures at the next report.

Project David Brown #1

New Year, New Goals.

Stunned by the fact that I was up, had eaten breakfast and was not significantly hungover by Midday on New Years Day, I thought that I might as well get straight out in the barn and make some progress towards one of this years aims.

I am quite sure that my 1971 David Brown, Select-A-Matic 880, 2.5L, 3 Cylinder Diesel tractor would prove very useful in this years gardening plans. For this reason I really want to get it going by mid spring. This will be easier said than done as the engine is seized solid.



I have been aware that the next step was to get the head and sump off the engine and see what the state of affairs is. Assisted by one of our new years party guests, and with a bit of a struggle we finally persuaded the head to separate from the engine by tea-time on the first.

What we found, was both good and bad, the state of the bores suggests that they are the reason why the engine is stuck due to a significant amount of rust binding the piston to the bore. The good news here is that it could be something much worse.....