Craig has moved his Plowman project from his website to mine so it's all in one place. There's only one place to start and that's from the beginning so here we go.

Here's a project that came to the shop February 20, 2006. It is an AMERICAN PLOWMAN tractor. There was one obvious problem: we could see INTO the front cylinder through two openings in the area between the upper jacket and the crankcase top. NOT a good start.

This was the first thing staring us in the face and the reason it came here:

In the center of the above photo is the #1 cylinder wrist pin which wore through the cylinder.

This is how it looked from the inside. The thing at the top of the cylinder is the very top of the piston. Interestingly we didn't find anywhere near enough pieces inside the crankcase that would make up a piston.

  This is exactly how we found the connecting rod when we removed the cylinder block.

Here is the damage inside the crankcase. Luckily it won't make any difference but someone did a very good repair to the hole in the crankcase because it wasn't at all noticable from the outside.

We've walked around this thing long enough so things are happening again. The owner had provided 1 piston to fill in the empty hole but changed his mind and rounded up a set of four replacements along with some piston pins. With the arrival of the replacements it became necessary to bore the other 3 cylinders. Remember #1 cylinder had previously been sleeved. This particular tractor uses a very weird Waukesha engine with a 3 main crankshaft. The mains are progressively smaller back to front. Craig did not want to take on babbitting the mains so the owner took it to an old friend of his who babbitted the mains and rods. He did a first class job too!

Here's a shot of the cylinder block which has been redone.

This could be one reason the engine self destructed. The tangs on the oil pump shaft were found to be sheared off. Possibly a result of trying a cold weather start with water in the pump.