the Walnut Diary

Still glowing from the publication of his second book, Boosters and Barkers. UBC Press, 2023, my friend David Roberts asked for an update on farm news dating from their visit last summer when the garage was in pieces.

The garage is finished and quietly going about its business.  My 2003 Tacoma is scheduled for a partial restoration of frame cross members in order to support its exhaust system.  I have a good welder as a neighbour but he has been discovered by local businesses and has little time to work in our little shop.  The quest for the 14 bolts and 8 nuts to fit the expensive Toyota cross member kept me amused for several otherwise idle days.  Strange thread:  M10.25 bolts.  

I asked my son for the use of his trailer hauler in the interim, and therein lay a week of confusion.  A high-mileage 2010 Toyota Tundra with a 5.7 litre engine is a nightmare to repair.  The battery was dead.  Boosting didn’t work, so I put a charger on it at the end of a long cord.  Well on into the night I tried to revive the adventure-equipped monster.  It lit up all right, but then smoke came rolling out from under the hood, a lot of it.  In the dark.  Shutting it off stopped the smoke, but the serpentine belt had been cooked by then.  The real problem is a seized alternator.  It lives underneath the power steering pump.  Access is very tight, through the right front fender and up from underneath.  Much easier if you remove the radiator….  I spent a week figuring out how to remove two, 12 mm bolts.  Today I gave up and put the right front wheel back on, the job of an hour because I couldn’t lift the thing high enough to line the holes up with the studs, and then I backed it outside to do other things.

With the shop clear I dropped the bush hog from the CaseIH 255 tractor and picked the snowblower out of a shed with chains and its loader, my first attempt to lift something heavy with the 3000 lb. tractor without a counter-weight on the back such as the bush hog.  At speeds less than 1800 rpm lifting the snowblower stalls the tractor.  Small engines burn much less fuel, eh? Just to be safe I put it in 4WD and gently eased it out of the shed, across some lawn and into the shop where a platform awaited the implement.  Today’s job was to attach the blower to the 3 pt. hitch on the CaseIH 255 tractor.  That went reasonably well until everything was complete and I tried to start it. Dead.

I’ve grown quite fond of this expensive antique.  It presents me with problems of logic quite frequently, and I derive hours of fun figuring them out.  This time a battery shut-off switch had worked its way loose from the cab firewall, still allowing the electric controls on the snowblower to work and the cabin lights to illuminate, but nothing controlled by the ignition switch to operate.  Once I had located a 25 mm socket to tighten it, it was fine.  The tractor’s most endearing puzzles happened this summer.  I was mowing around my walnut trees and it suddenly lost power and died.  A bit later it let me start up and limp to the shop.  Turned out that the fuel filter was plugged with lady bug carcasses.  Turns out that cumbersome washer/strainer in the fuel tank can’t be left off or bugs will get in.  Oh yeah, the fuel filter is 1 1/2 ” shorter than the one listed in the manual.  I blew out the old one, a metal mesh, and reinstalled it.  

Later in the summer the oil light took to winking on just before it would stall.  The manual explained that this was a feature of this model.  I went around in circles for a couple of days on this one, and finally resolved to start replacing parts.  The only part I could identify from the descriptions was the oil pressure sender, and even though I have been loath to touch one of them on a vehicle since I twisted off the one on my first VW with a too enthusiastic application of a wrench, the sender was the only part mentioned in the manual which was actually available for purchase; it was 37 years old and a ten dollar part, so I bought it.  Taking the old one off required a 28 mm wrench.  We don’t own a 28 mm socket.  Turned out Charlie has some strange short, open-end wrenches designed to snap onto a ratchet.  One of them was a 28 mm.  But since that sender had been installed, a large girder from the loader frame had appeared next to it, leaving very little clearance for tools. It took a long Stanley 1/2″ ratchet with a flex head which Charlie had spent a fortune on used in an eBay purchase.  It removed the sender with effort, but no real jeopardy.  The return trip with the new sender required a 26 mm “very short wrench” from the same gadget set.

I’ll conclude with the Case’s crowning glory:  the oil filter.  The vendor had told me he had a hard time installing the new oil filter.  He is the service manager of a tractor dealership, so I should have paid more attention.  I also had a devil of a job removing the oil filter.  In fact, it came out with 1/4″ dents all over it.  The new one went in with much cursing.  I asked my welder about this when he was working on the bearings on the hoist this spring.  He looked and explained that a plumbing fitting seemed to be intruding into the space for the oil filter.  He would be happy to re-route the pipe, if I wished.  Next oil change in anticipation of James’s arrival, I removed the mangled filter and remarked that a narrower filter of the same length would likely go in and out without trouble.  As it happened, there was a used filter from a 4 cylinder Subaru in the drain tray from an oil change.  The thing twisted right on!  I took it to Napa in Smiths Falls, where I located a young man fonder of the store computer than the parts warehouse.  He found me a filter for the Case with the same outside dimensions and thread as the Subaru one, which also met the 24 hp diesel engine’s undemanding specifications.  It seems to work.

So of course I logged onto a Subaru oil filters discussion group.  These aficionados are astonishingly dedicated to their area of study.  My ingenuous question produced a week of informed discussion on the relative merits and defects of just about every oil filter on the market which will fit a Subaru.  With links to YouTube videos, the Subaru group gave me new insight into a murky corner of automotive engineering.  Did you know that the infamous FRAM supplies current Subaru oil filters, and that there is such a shortage of them at the moment that owners are forced to research alternatives? 

I eventually figured out that in 1986 the tractor had been delivered from the Mitsubishi factory in Japan to the Laurin factory in Quebec painted with CaseIH colours and English insignia and labels, where they dropped a matching top onto it, not paying much attention to things like oil filter access, and replacing the original fuel filter with a stock item to suit available space. Then it went to an Ontario dealership for sale to a customer under the brand CaseIH.  The heated cabin is really great in winter, though, so I can forgive quite a lot.

Update, 11 November, 2025

The CaseIH 255 had refused to start a couple of times over the summer, with symptoms showing a lack of line voltage as the cause. When wiggling wires and replacing a shut-off switch no longer worked, though a session with a battery charger did, I eventually reached in and grabbed the fan belt. The outside looked perfect, but the inside was an eroded collection of strings and rubber pellets. The simplest and cheapest component of the charging system was shot because of its owner’s neglect and stupidity. I sent Bet a photo of the belt and the local parts guys in Smiths Falls sent her home with one. Ten minutes later, the tractor was right as rain. Duh!