698T story of a working classic.

emaherx

The 698T is the tractor around here that we love to hate. We bought it about 15 years ago for 3000 Euro to help out with the silage making and since then it has done most of the baling. It was a much neglected tractor before we owned it and we haven't exactly treated it with much care since it arrived. Never really expected it to last this long . Until this year we have done very little work to it, except fitting a new clutch about 5 years ago and I fabricated some new mudguards in 2015 (just to hold the lights up off of the wheels ).

emaherx

Last year we put some new tyres on the back, one new and one nearly new tyre that was replaced previously on our 390T due to damage from re-bar, we had the tyre vulcanized. Very shortly after replacing the tyres the Turbo and the engine balancer failed :mad: .







I had to take the rocker cover off to time the balancer as the TDC1 mark on the fly wheel was not lining up with TDC of any cylinder. (don't know who fitted the flywheel but I'm sure it wasn't me :cool: )

emaherx

I'm missing some exhaust pieces to connect to back of turbo which are very hard to come by. So I had to do some guntering.

emaherx

After the work was completed on the engine the temperature gauge started reading way into the red which had me concerned as I was after replacing the thermostat. But on closer inspection there was no way the engine was even close to overheating. So after some fiddling around with the wiring I was finding all kinds of weird intermittent issues. I found that the temperature gauge would read correctly when the horn was disconnected.

So I pulled the engine loom out and found that it had overheated and many of the wires were starting to melt together,not surprising for a tractor of its age but could have been a complete disaster especially with the amount of time and money after being spent repairing the engine.



In the past I have taken looms and repaired or reproduced by copying one wire at a time, but as my wife had a baby girl 2 weeks ago, I haven't had much time to spend fixing this tractor I bought a loom from http://www.tractorelectrics.ie/. The loom cost 200 Euro but this was good value, cheap compared to most looms I have priced in the past and was worth every penny with the time it saved. I was concerned that the quality would be lacking and that it would be full of badly crimped cheap connectors, but I was pleasantly surprised to find good quality connectors which matched the originals also the entire loom is in a protective corrugated flexible conduit.

emaherx

And finally back at work and running well.