[AT] Inside the PTO assembly, Farmall M

[Dean Vinson]

Great tractor weekend here.  Having previously drained all that oil out of
the transmission on my 1950 M, I set out to see if I could fix the PTO,
which had never worked since I bought the tractor--pulling up on the PTO
lever didn't do anything, and the lever hardly moved at all.

I'd first hoped it was just something binding in the external linkage, and
then thought it must be some worn components in the internal linkage.  Turns
out to have been a result of a sloppy repair job at some point in the past:
the shifter lever on the PTO housing had been re-welded to its shaft at the
wrong angle, so there wasn't enough range of motion left for it to engage
the PTO before the lever hit the stop.  I didn't figure all this out until
after buying a replacement PTO assembly from a salvage yard, so now I have
two of them.  The one that works will go on the tractor... anybody need one
that doesn't quite work?  :-)

I put some pictures and a longer narrative up at
http://www.vinsonfarm.net/suburban_M.html.

Only thing I wonder about it is how it got left in the condition it was in.
If you needed the PTO badly enough to take it apart and weld some broken
pieces back together, but then it didn't work, wouldn't you try again?  I
guess maybe not if it seemed like more trouble than the tractor was worth,
or more than you had time to deal with.

Dean Vinson
Dayton, Ohio
www.vinsonfarm.net