As time allows, I like to tinker with my old N-Series Ford tractor. Truth be told, I have not been keeping all of you up to current on the work that’s been completed over the last few months. My son and I are just picking away at stuff, making the old girl as nice and functional as we can. Due to the machine shops around here being backed up for months, our Flathead V8 is still waiting for the block to be checked and touched up for eventual swap into this thing. Until then, though, we have determined that we want a good running little machine for fun and potential profit. See, we just bought a 1940s vintage Dearborn snowplow for the tractor and we’re going to have some fun pushing snow once we get that rig squared away.
One of the annoying problems we have had involved the engine governor. It was cracked and leaking oil and we just figured replacing it would be the best idea here. Wrong. This turned out to be an expensive lesson on the fact that in many cases “new” parts are not going to cause you anything but headaches with these tractors and fixes/rebuilds are the best way to go. In the video below I walk you through how a governor works on these tractors and why they are there in the first place.
As much as it is a “rev limiter” the real job of this thing is to maintain RPM in various working conditions. There is no foot throttle on these tractors. You set engine speed with a lever on a quadrant behind the steering wheel. When you are working the tractor and the engine slows, the governor automatically gives it throttle to bring the RPM back to where you have it set to.
Simple devices that unfortunately are 80 years old in some cases now. We opted to replace it with a new one and this was our mistake. A couple hundred bucks and a couple hours of frustration later, we sourced eBay and found an intact, clean, and well functioning OEM unit for half the money of the new one and it actually works.
Bolting the thing on and off is easy, in fact none of the process is hard, it just takes time. So when you swap on a non-working, jacked up, made in some god forsaken place, “new” one and the tractor acts like it hates you, investing time to see what YOU did wrong is the next step. As it turns out, we did nothing wrong, had all the linkage adjusted properly, and it was the internals of the “new” governor that were garbage.
So watch the video below and proceed at your own risk!
