69427
The Artist formerly known as Turbo84
Spent a few days back home (in South Dakota) visiting relatives and attending an antique tractor jamboree. After my dad retired several years ago he picked up a few beat-up antique John Deere tractors and fixed them up. He, my sister, and I would drive them around the grounds and in the daily parade at the jamboree. Did that for a bunch of years, and after dad passed away I've inherited a couple of the tractors, and the job of getting them out of storage each year and getting them running. Here's the one I drive each year:
It's a 1937 A, two cylinder, odd fire. A bunch of years ago when I was discussing an ECM I was designing for a customer my dad made a joking comment about putting fuel injection on the '37. We both laughed, and then I thought, what the hell, we could do that. I rounded up a bunch of the parts (ECM, harness, sensors, coil, and injection hardware) and dad scrounged up an in-tank pump, small hideaway battery, and switches) and he started to plan the installation. My dad wanted the tractor to look stock so we decided to hide all the goodies under the hood if we could. Because of the size (volume) of the cylinders (and the resulting injector flow rate concerns) and injector packaging I decided to run a TBI setup on the engine. The one barrel TBI, ECM, and serial data cable are all hidden under the hood. The distributor is equipped with a modified Chrysler VR sensor for RPM and crank position info for the ECM. Because the engine is an odd fire design (180-540 degrees) and the intake ports feed off a single tube (the one barrel original carb is replaced with a hollow look-alike dummy carb) I needed to time the injector pulses to keep one cylinder from stealing fuel from the other cylinder's intake stroke. I got a cam sensor off a Buick 3.8L SFI engine and my dad modified things to install everything in the cam housing. To our great surprise and astonishment the damn thing fired up with minimal trouble the first time (there's no starter. You need to manually turn the engine over by grabbing the 60 pound flywheel that's in front of the leftside axle tube). I plugged the serial data link into my laptop and dialed in the spark and fuel curves. So far I've been driving this thing in the parades for about 15 or 16 years, and thankfully it's never stalled out on me. It's obviously not a speed machine, but it's a connection with my dad and I enjoy driving it when I can.
It's a 1937 A, two cylinder, odd fire. A bunch of years ago when I was discussing an ECM I was designing for a customer my dad made a joking comment about putting fuel injection on the '37. We both laughed, and then I thought, what the hell, we could do that. I rounded up a bunch of the parts (ECM, harness, sensors, coil, and injection hardware) and dad scrounged up an in-tank pump, small hideaway battery, and switches) and he started to plan the installation. My dad wanted the tractor to look stock so we decided to hide all the goodies under the hood if we could. Because of the size (volume) of the cylinders (and the resulting injector flow rate concerns) and injector packaging I decided to run a TBI setup on the engine. The one barrel TBI, ECM, and serial data cable are all hidden under the hood. The distributor is equipped with a modified Chrysler VR sensor for RPM and crank position info for the ECM. Because the engine is an odd fire design (180-540 degrees) and the intake ports feed off a single tube (the one barrel original carb is replaced with a hollow look-alike dummy carb) I needed to time the injector pulses to keep one cylinder from stealing fuel from the other cylinder's intake stroke. I got a cam sensor off a Buick 3.8L SFI engine and my dad modified things to install everything in the cam housing. To our great surprise and astonishment the damn thing fired up with minimal trouble the first time (there's no starter. You need to manually turn the engine over by grabbing the 60 pound flywheel that's in front of the leftside axle tube). I plugged the serial data link into my laptop and dialed in the spark and fuel curves. So far I've been driving this thing in the parades for about 15 or 16 years, and thankfully it's never stalled out on me. It's obviously not a speed machine, but it's a connection with my dad and I enjoy driving it when I can.
