Air Compressor Room - Part 6, and a bunch of completely unrelated stuff

 "You could leave life right now.  Let that determine what you do and say and think." - Marcus Aurelius

The DuPont work schedule runs you back and forth on days and nights for three weeks.  At the end of that, you get rewarded with seven days off to make up for it - even so, you are putting in 42 hour weeks.  Unfortunately this past cycle, those seven days got annihilated - I had to work all of them but two days.   Rather than go out to the shop and work on something else, I chose to rest.

Yesterday I was feeling a bit put off by the lack of progress on my own sh*t, so I warmed up the shop and tinkered just a little bit.  I had just come off a stretch of six straight 12 hour night shifts, so getting involved with anything very taxing physically or mentally was not on the agenda :)

Instead I just did a bit of grunt labor.  I put the third and final coat of urethane on the door for the compressor room.  It had already become a bit of a table.  Not a very good look with coat #2 dry on it.  I'm not a painter, in case you were wondering.

Final coat, drying.

Final coat, dry.  That's as good as it's going to get.  It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me, and this side of the door will be seen from inside of the compressor room.  It opens inwards.

The other side of this door also needs three coats of polyurethane, so that will be today's project.  Once the other side of the door is coated, I can - finally - hang the door and install the doorknob and the trim.  I really really want to organize all that junk that I removed from the room.  In the near future I'm planning to install a parts washer and a sand blasting cabinet in that room - there is a large and involved project coming up that will require a lot of surface prep and parts cleaning.

 

A buddy of mine gave me this cool name plate that came off a large GE machine.  I finally got something worthy of poking screw holes into the main support beam!

Since I had the shop warmed up to roll polyurethane, and I was already out there, I fiddled a little bit with the tractor, too.  

The tractor has two separate hydraulic pumps.  The front pump supplies high pressure oil just for the front end loader.  The rear pump supplies oil to the three point hitch to adjust the height of towed farming implements.  The rear farming implement can be a rake, hoe, rotary tiller, brush hog, etc, but you have to be able to adjust the height using hydraulics.  

When the tractor got split front to back, the rear hydraulic system had to be disconnected, because the pump is up front on the engine.  When I disconnected the rear hydraulic fittings, the o-rings cracked.  They were hard and brittle with age.  

I'd recently purchased some new o-rings, and finally got up under the tractor, got greasy and installed them.  Hopefully the fittings hold pressure.  My track record with such things isn't that great.  I've blown half the hoses on the loader since I bought the tractor.  They are pretty old though.

A few things remain to be done on the tractor.  Some of the electrical connections from splitting the tractor need to be re-connected, as well as the engine tachometer.  Below is the cable that goes from the battery to the starter.  The small wire goes to the starter solenoid.  I wasn't doing anything challenging yesterday, though.  Too tired.

I still need to re-assemble the steering arm using the new *metric* square stock.

Below:  It will take time and patience to grind the new square stock down enough that it will fit in the key hole - hopefully with a lot less slop than the old one.

Lastly the front driveshaft will need to be installed.  It comes with a shaft guard (bottom tube).  I doubt that this shaft guard was for safety.  It was probably to keep the farmer's crops from getting wrapped up in the drive shaft and stopping the engine.  The box with the inner tube is to make rubber replacement parts to replace the beat-up tape that previously sealed the shaft guard at each end.  It was one big wad of electrical tape when I pulled it apart.  Having a parts washer while doing this project would have been really nice...

I saw this item randomly while looking for other stuff on Amazon.  

 

When I restored the old Wilton 9-600 vise, I had intended to have a set of soft jaws made from copper or brass, so that I could clamp stuff without marring the finish.  It turns out that is unnecessary!  For just a fraction of that cost, they make these cool magnetic soft jaw attachments with hard rubber grips!!!!  You don't even have to pop off the hard jaws.

 Below:  Original hard surface jaws.

 Below:  Magnetic soft jaws slipped over the hard jaws.  Now it's possible to clamp down on chrome or wood without marring the finish.  Brilliant, and inexpensive!

Part 7 is here.