COMPRESSION TESTING A FORD OSCO 192 DIESEL, OR HOW THE GOOD OLD BOYS ARE LOOKING AFTER ME

[bob mitchell]

Just a simple compression test - that's all - before you take the cylinder head off - standard stuff.

But there is such a story here - at least for me, who at 60 is really struggling to find any sign that what I expected reality to be like when I finally grew up still exists. The story is not unlike the iconnozation (and deservedly so) that the magazine Wooden Boat gives the old time boat builders. However, the subject of these men in Alabama just happens to be tractors, which means diesels, like the Ford 172 and 192, marinized by Osco, and often found in Newporters.

So the story really starts a couple of posts ago, when Bill and I, investigating the source of a clacking noise once the engine warms up, discover that I have a very bent push rod. In the post I nievely hypothesized the reasons for a bent push rod - but as it turns out Ford 192's are just bad about bending rods. AND, in the mean time, as I am spending a lot of my waking time seeing if this engine will love me, I find another way to bend a push rod by not seating it correctly in the cam follower (tappet). Having to find some more pushrods led me to Russel Tractor parts, 15 minutes down the highway, sort of in the sticks, or lets just say out of the main stream, where four guys are behind the counter blazing away on the phones locating and selling new and used tractor parts, I swear, to the whole world. I hold up my bent push rod, mumble Ford 172 (that's what I thought at the time - it was the original engine), and the guy looks at me, and says wait a minute, I will look. They view me with mild derision, because the last time I had come in, looking for a lift pump, I had a tank top on and my two beads were showing. (One guy stared hard, and later, after we had become friends, i.e. like total rebuild kit - although that wasn't it, he accused me of being an Elton John look alike, but I countered with Micky Dolenze, and he acquiesed) Anyway, a minute or two later he comes back with 5 push rods for $8 bucks apiece, and I am astounded. Well, as the next post (Engine Saga continues) tells, the push rods did not silence the clacking noise. So I return the next day and ask, what good guy can rebuild my engine? And of I go to see Ray, up on Sand Mountain. Ray is pretty big, wears bibbs, and is approachnig 80, and has a countenance like the blue sky and floating clouds that fill the sky in all directions above Sand Mountain. I guess he had been there a while. We have a great front porch conversation, and a week later (I got a set of stairs to build) we meet at three and we analyze the noise. Since it wasn't the push rods, the next thing to investigate is the injector. So I tell about that in the last post, and I guess that's where the compression story begins.