My father gave me a tractor. The story is sad and sordid, so let’s pass that and get right to the tractor. I hauled it from beyond Columbus, OH back to the suburbs of Philly back in August. I’ve been telling my wife for years that I wanted an old tractor to work on and play with, and now I’ve got one.

It is a 1953 Allis Chalmers CA with a narrow front end and was converted to 12V at some point. It has a snap-coupler there was a plow, but I had to abandon it. I’m sure I’ll regret that at some point. The starter is bad, the generator is bad, the hydraulics leak and I’m sure there are problems I haven’t found yet. It runs and drives, so that’s a huge start. I have the original owner’s manual, too.

My son wants to be an electrician, he did some training at the local technical high school and now going to a trade school. He’s enthusiastic about it and this is a great way for us both to learn about about engines and hydraulics together. My wife is not so happy because the tractors sits in front of the garage door, sometimes immobile and I want to spend money on parts. My daughter, in her early teens, was excited at first, but then when she realized being a tractor girl in our area makes her an outlier at school, decided tractors are not cool.

First, I bought a parts manual, shop manual and another copy of the owner’s manual so I could save the original. I had no idea old tractors were such a popular pastime. I even found a local outfit that does tractor starters and electrical systems that has a service to restore old tractors. For the paint, maybe, but I want to fix the workings myself.

The fuel filter leaked a bit, so the first fix was to replace the gasket and screen. It was sort of a test to see how engaged the boy would be. He was all in, from taking they parts out of the box to cleaning up the tools at the end.

I’ve been doing the research. This forum, other forums, youtube videos, blogs, etc. I had a wonderful conversation with Steve at B&B Custom Circuits and I’ve really enjoyed Sugarmaker’s thread on restoring his CA.

My current task is the hydraulics. I have two reasons to select that before the electrical systems. One, I need to get that heavy snap coupler out of the garage. My wife complains about it because it is in the way and she can barely move it by herself. Second, since the transmission, differential and hydraulics use a shared oil pool, repairing that system keeps the tractor mobile so I can get it out of the way if need be.

How do we get to the hydraulics? They’re under the deck plate! We removed the fenders and the deck, feeling along for what was still fastened and what came loose at each step. The fasteners are a mix of stuff. Out of ten bolts holding the fenders on, eight needed a 9/16” socket, but two needed a 3/4”. They all had square heads, too. I don’t like that, so I bought consistent SAE Grade 5 hardware. I’ll save the old bolts, but there’s only so many concessions to historicity I can make. We were also about three wrench sizes short, lacking the larger end of the spectrum. $100 on Craftsman large box-ends.

The old hoses were orange and that was their one positive. The outer shield was deteriorated, the wire reinforcing was exposed and they had no swivel fittings. I ended up cutting one out. We didn’t realize that cutting a hydraulic hose, even a damaged one, was difficult. I tried a sawzall, bolt cutters and eventually went to a pair of big sidecutter pliers to finish the job. I should have gone for the angle grinder with a cutting wheel first. I plugged all the ports to keep the system clean.

The mud and grease under the deck is tenacious stuff. We pressure washed, but that didn’t help much. I hit it with a wire brush and that still needed more elbow grease than I thought necessary. Scraping seemed to work best. The crud had been there so long the paint under it was a brighter shade of orange. When I get the hydraulics back together, I think I’ll take it to a detailer nearby and get them to hit it with their professional pressure washer and degreaser.

Since we’re treating this as a learning experience, I’ve been sending the boy (he’s 18, but going to trade school and living at home, so I still call him that) to a hydraulics place near his school. He stops by after school, talks to the counter sales guy, and gets my parts. This is practice communicating technical information from a client to a professional in a different field. He did a really good job. I called the guy this morning too thank him for being patient with my son. They’ve been great – Penndel Hydraulics in Penndel, PA. We need nine quarts of hydro-trans fluid, but he only has five gallon increments. He helped the boy look for smaller quantities before selling him the bucket.

The plungers for the rams are pitted at the end. The draw bar had been on so long and the ends of the plungers exposed for so long that they had damage. I bought a pair of seal kits, thinking that if they weren’t too bad, we’d do it. I thought a bit about that. The system is closer to 4000 psi than 3000psi and all that separates that pressure from my tender flesh is a piece of 1/8” steel. Let’s get professional help, I thought, so I asked Penndel for a professional opinion. The verdict was that repair wasn’t possible, they’d have to fabricate new plungers. Our use case is minimal – I’m not farming anything or using it for mowing. Given that and the type of seals required, their suggestion was to just repack it and go. They would last quite a while. There is one problem with this hydraulic system. Every fastener on the tractor is US Customary except two: the swivels on the hoses are 17mm.

So we’re about $750 into a free tractor and we haven’t done the labor to put it back together.

After this, we’ll start on the electrical systems.