how to adjust that POS torque limiter clutch while it's in the tractor. 

It's only ~1/4" thick and I probably could have punched a hole in it with sledge  hammer rather than bothered cutting it.    The plate under the PTO is thicker and higher strength steel than this stuff was.   

Personally I think they could have easily put an inspection plate in there like other manufacturers tend to do for anything with a flywheel mounted clutch of any kind.  

Maybe there is nothing to be adjusted in there but for piece of mind there can never be too many inspection plates on a tractor's driveline!    

When I make a cover plate for it I may die grind it a bit.  It's pretty soft metal and will clean up rather fast and easy.  

Also I had no idea how much actual adjusting range I had to play with either.   From the bottom getting a good straight on view so I could estimate the clearances between the spring plate and the backing plate seemed like a more practical method.   That and i couldn't drop important pieces in to some inaccessible place never be seen again either.

I thought about machining  them down instead of adding the washers but if I ever do have to split the tractor and put a new clutch in I didn't want them to be too short for later.  

It was the most logical method and way I could come up with! 

The primary load bearing areas of the casting seem to be pretty decent in thickness so I have every reason to feel this area is nothing more than filler. 

Given the grinding spark characteristics and way it broke out  (semi malleable) I would put it as mid grade cast.  Not good cast steel but not JD's recycled soup cans and beach sand stuff from that era either!     

Normally I would agree but everything I know about stress analysis and the appearance of the castings says that this is not a structural area by any bit imagination.  There is nothing of significance in any axis (front  to back or side to side) that it ties together that doesn't have a substantially greater structural casting bordering the whole area.       

The side towards the engine terminates at the thick steel engine adapter plate and has no relevant structural significance to its function or stress loads and the majority of tensile the stresses in this area are on the two bottom most bolts that tie the transmission casting to the frame rails which is a 90 degree plane of stress to this bottom area.    

I'm comfortable with it.  I've seen people blow far larger holes in machines that  went on to live to tell about it.    

It will never have a loader. It's too big and clunky for that kind of work.   Hay baling and flail mowing is all it's ever going to do for us and that could be done with a tractor half its size.  

Plus We have a 8030 already set up as a loader.   

So are you saying that AC made these 175+ HP 9+ tone tractors out of such incredibly low grade steel that is so poorly cast that their structural integrity is so highly questionable that if a 1/2 pound  ~5" x 8" x 1/4" piece of metal is taken out of the floor of  the transmission bellhousing cavity that the whole tractor will be structurally compromised?  

Just curious being all I ever hear on this site is how superiorly designed and built every product AC ever made is.    I mean really which is it?   Superior overbuilt designs made with superior materials and craftsmanship or not?    It can't be both.  

Being if this little insignificant hole will take down a tractor this size so easily I might as well just drive it to the scrap yard tomorrow and get my $45 a ton and be done with it.  

Also not everyone has the time and means to take a tractor this size apart just to tighten something up.   I have the equipment to do it but I don't have the justification.  especially if a alternative method can do the same job in a fraction of the time and effort.   

    NNNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!! 

So what you're saying is drive it slowly and carefully so as to not hit any bumps on the way to the scrap yard.    

Nah. It'll be fine.  I'll put some orange halloween duct tape over it tomorrow.   

 Maybe drilling four holes in the corners and cutting between them would lessen the stress cracking fears that someone mentioned if anyone was thinking about trying this.

Happy Halloween!!!!!

Given I had no easy way of  finding out how the castings were laid out inside the housing I had to do a bunch of exploratory 1/8" drill holes about  1/2 an inch apart to find the back edge of the thin bottom area I would be cutting out.   You can see one in the rear center area of the casting.  

I went from the weep hole back then up the sides about 4 inches in each direction then ground things out right across the lines of holes.   I also had no idea how wide of hole I would need to make so that's why no large diameter corner holes were drilled.  

This was all poke and go exploratory cutting work.   

Now that I know the basic dimensions and metal thicknesses of the area that can be cut out if I had to do it again I would either use a 1" bi metal hole saw bit and put the four corners in then cut between them and given as thin as everything turned out to be I would do the cuts with a small angle grinder and cut off wheel.  

Either that or use a 3" - 4" bimetal hole saw and cut a pair of holes side by side, and go in that  way.    

I know it wasn't a perfect let alone ideally done cut job. It was never intended to be but some post clean up with some more detail grinding and die grinder work won't take long to fix it.

Mostly the only reason I posted this fix is to show that if a person chooses to they can get into the torque limiter assy and tighten the thing up in less than 2 hours work with basic tools if they need to get a tractor going again opposed to sending it to a shop and waiting a week or more plus spending a few thousand having it done.       

When it's Saturday evening and your tractor stops moving and you don't have the resources to easily split it yourself plus your nearest shop that can do it is either a very long tow (or implement truck hire and haul plus a week or two wait start to finish) away and you really don't have a few thousand dollars to throw at fixing an old tractor and you see that someone online shows it can be accessed and bolted tight in a hour or two's work with minimal tools which are you going to take to keep it running?     

For me cut the damn belly open, stick 6 washers in it and be back in the field in less than 2 hours would be it! It's that or abandon the tractor/scrap it if I don't have the time and money to toss at fixing it.  

 So, yea, exactly as you said, guys have to chop them full of holes and cobble them together as best as they can to keep them running which leads to them not being worth much more thah scrap prices to the next guy. 

It wasn't much of stretch to come to the conclusion that one could be easily added in this case.    

Odds are if they had built a model that used a normal clutch and that transmission case they would have put a port in that spot.  It's got more than enough heavy casting on three sides (if you go out to the sides far enough) to be able drill and tap cover plate bolt holes into.      

Maybe so but for many splitting a tractor this size is well beyond their ability and also given the age and general shop time costs involved with anything like this well beyond financial justification for an old tractor that has no significant value to the vast majority of farming people any more.   

I never claimed it was the world's greatest fix but it is a fix that may keep a few more old tractors working well enough to stay out of the scrap yard for a few more years.  

For us we have no emotional ties to these tractors so when it does get to the point the transmission goes out or something else major gives up it's getting scrapped.    

It's not old enough to be an antique collectible nor is it worth putting much into to fix when a whole different tractor like this one can be had for ~$3000.  

As much as many here don't like hearing it AC tractors of this era are now at the point of being throw away units.    You can buy them cheap  then run them until a major breakdown happens and scrap em without issue because they aren't worth anything largely due to so many years of terrible company service and support.   

That lack of value to anyone is exactly how we ended up with it.   $3000 at a local seasonal equipment auction got us a tractor with a low hour engine because nobody wanted it.  

Given what  it looked like when we got it it was clear it sat in some corner of someone's storage building for years before getting a pair of mismatch half dead car batteries stuffed in it just to get it to the auction.    The same story dozens of other AC and other less popular brand machines have had that went through the auction over the years.

They get run through the auction in hopes to get a few dollars more than the scrap man would pay.   Most do but many not by much.  

As for our tractor to see it in person it's clear it's a high hour machine that lived a hard life.  As long as I can keep up with the little fixes and find alternatives to the expensive ones it will have home here but after that it's scrap metal.     

We are pretty much the 'end of life users' for equipment.  Never claimed otherwise.

Vehicles get ran until they fall apart and machinery get ran until it is cheaper to buy something else.   That's how it works here.   

We run things until they are no longer worth servicing and after us  things go to the scrap yard where the scrap man pays by the ton with no concern about what something looks like or how it was taken care of. 

That's who the next owner of this machine will likely be and when he gets to just going to be chopped into bits and melted down.  

It's just the circle of life for a machine and what keeps the working world moving forward. Someone has to be the last person to run something before it gets parted out or melted down and that's us.   I see no shame in it.

No truer words have been said! 

  You assume cutting that hole makes no difference in the integrity and you justify by some reasoning I would never understand, but you seriously compromised that casting. If somebody working for me did that, they would be fired immediately, and if I took that tractor into a repair shop and they did that to a tractor of mine, that mechanics stones would be on an anvil, and Id have a ball peen hammer,,,,,if you get my drift!

How much digging did you have to do to find that just to end up using it out of context in the end?  
 

Personally, I think most here all wound up about the hole are just butt hurt because it was an easy fix to some past problem they spent way too much time and money on themselves.  Sour grapes effects in play is all I see in this. 

I believe I pointed that out several times now that just beyond where I cut the hole there are much thicker and heavier castings in place.  I simply did not see a need to cut the hole that far out in order to get access to what I needed to. 

As is, now that I know what is where I am pretty sure that if absolutely needed the work could been done through a ~2"  x 4" opening as well.   

As far as I am concerned there was a factory hole down there to begin with and I just made it a bit bigger so it could serve a functional purpose in doing service work to a hard to get at component.

Doesn't sound like he trades. Seems he uses it up and scraps it instead!

I don't consider a 14,000+ hour machine that's been ran hard a low hour barely used unit. 

I don't know who owned it before we did but it's obvious far worse things were done to it than anything I could come up with justifications for. 

It appears that it was factory equipped with three point being some of the related controls and linkages are still there but i have no idea what justified taking it out but I have suspicions that it may be why the PTO controls would never lock in as they should. 

It looks like it originally had a two spool auxiliary hydraulics system but a third one was added and the original three point draft lever controls it now. I'm guessing that was done when the three point systems was taken out.  

It also had much of its original wiring and related components butchered well before we got it to add who knows what and to bypass a number to things  as well being when we got it had a push button hardwired  (14 ga house wire no less) directly from the main battery cable on the the starter solenoid and back to start it being  the wiring in the dash and around the engine for the stock key switch, start button and ether injection system and other things had been cut to bits. 

The alternator had a 8 ga wire running from it directly to the batteries in order to charge them since the factory line in the wiring harness was burned off where it ties into the two main automatic circuit breakers.    In the first good day of running it smoked and locked up so a new 140 amp unit and the proper size and routed cabling got put in. 

The air conditioning compressor and hoses were not hooked up and appeared to have been that way for a long time.  

The back window was plexiglass held in with a roll or more of very weathered duct tape and bungee straps. 

The heater blower was packed full of mice nest and wired to a single on/off toggle switch and not the factory multi speed one even though the factory three speed controls did work once the power was restored to it. 

  

Cab side and single rear lights were busted off.   

Since we got it I have replaced the alternator repaired or outrightly replaced all the damaged/non functional wiring and everything related to it so that it works as it should or has been updated to handle higher loads better.  From what I can tell the only working system left was the key switch feed to excite the alternator.   Everything else had been cut up and ultimately bypassed or just left for dead.

 

The heating and air conditioning systems have been cleaned out flushed repaired and are in correct and all around nice working order.

  

The back window is still plexiglass but it's properly mounted and things are cleaned up to where if I do get new glass for it it should be a drop in job. 

All the lighting has been updated to 55W halogen bulbs front and back plus two more added up front to cure the big front and center night time blind spot issue these tractors have and one more in the rear to improve night time work. 

All the shift linkage and hydraulic control cabling has been either repalced or adjusted to work as it is supposed to.

  

It's been converted from being a 1000 RPM only PTO to to dual speed.  

It's been power washed and cleaned inside and out in detail and gets the dust blown out of the cab whenever I am near an air hos.  

All filters fluids have been flushed and replaced with new and are now on a proper service schedule.  

And above all as new problems arise they are dealt with in as fair and rational way as can be justified as is this torque limiter issue was.  It now works as I understand it to work. My approach of cutting a hole may not be well taken or liked but it got it done without wasting more time and money.

Now as for other things that are still not right, it has a air leak in the fuel system that I have yet to track down so if it sits for a few days I have to pump the primer 5 - 6 times to get it to start. 

I don't care for the old either assist systems so as I have done with all our diesel equipment it will be getting a set of glow coil intake air pre heaters installed in the intake manifold just ahead of the head intake ports one of these days that will be activated off the original either button.  

All things considered given what had been done to it before we got it and what all I have repaired or updated  the hole in the bottom of the bell housing seems like a pretty minor abuse to keep it working as it should for some time longer. 

I'm not sure what the in shop equivilant repair bill for everything I have fixed and updated would have cost but I have now put the equivalent of several long days work into it plus close to $1000 in parts so far to get it back up to where it's now a fully functional and properly functioning tractor again.  

Maybe you and all the experts who know everything about everything can give me a fair and justified price quote on what that is all worth in your local service shops.  

To me I see no less than 30 hours shop time (remanufacturing wiring harnesses alone is a time consuming bitch) which would have a value way beyond what the machine is worth, given its age  running hours and overall as bought condition, before having had a single part added to the bill. 

The way I see it, we bought a good running low hour AC diesel engine that included what was left of a tractor attached to it.   

I thought I made that pretty obvious but then again I am pretty sure a number of people here have the reading skills and comprehension of a 2nd grader.

 

We generally don't sell or trade.    It's end of life here and given the amount of farm machinery alone that goes to the scrap yards nationwide obviously we are not the only ones who see things that way too. 

If someone thinks this tractor is so valuable and special  given some of the prices they have posted feel free to to buy it off me.   It's a steal at $8000+ given some of  the numbers posted so far.  Hell, I'll even knock $2000 off that just for the hole in the bottom!  

Yea, but if it pisses of one of you semi literate A-holes off as much as everything else I say does it's worth it!    

x2

Odd. I was just over there to check you facts and once again I see nothing of what you report here to be true just as you and one or two others have done in other threads including the oil one. 

How does that work exactly?  You say something is true then it's shown to be largely inaccurate to out rightly wrong and then you boast about it here as if your right anyways assuming that no one , especially the questionably accused, will fact check you and report back with what they find? 

  

Wouldn't a person with at least half a brain just maybe figure out you do exactly what it is you claim to dislike while patting  yourself on the back for your superiority despite your being easily confirmed to be largely incorrect or worse  repeatedly?    

 I think we can all agree keeping it going is just beating a dead horse. It's like a fire: cut off the fuel, and the fire goes out!

cosmetically that tractor looks identical to ours.   Your rear tires are better though. ours are worn near bald.  

As  for the slow boat to china I am pretty sure the only other bidder was the local tractor salvage dealer that picks these machines up for as little as possible and given the good engine I suspect that's the only reason it got to $3000 to begin with.   

As for the repairs I have not found them to be all that unreasonable.  For me they are more time consumers and educational experiences  than anything which will all go towards knowing better what to look for when the next one crosses our path at an auction.   

I've got all the major bugs and past abuses fixed up to were it's a stable reliable tractor for what we need it for so unless it develops a major transmission problem or the engine goes to bits it will be here for a long time.