I've just started a return to my day job, remotely for now, so am having less time to tinker on the JCB.
What little daylight time I had yesterday was speant fixing the fuel transfer pump (it had melted plastic surrounding one of the on/off switch spade terminals because the female one was a loose fit on to it - the pump is really rubbish, the design runs backawards to the arrows on the cast pump body and labels because it's been cast wrong for the inlet and outlet relative to the rotor!),then transferring the fuel back into the tank, bleeding the fuel system, and finally warming the engine up to dump the oil.
During the fuel system priming I noticed that the starter motor was getting rather hot at the power and earth connections. A quick check with a spanner and I found they were just a bit loose, tightening them up, about 1/4 turn, certainly seemed to improve the cranking speed and the made the engine far easier to start!
While warming the engine up I took the oportunity to extended the 'Extradig' boom so I could clean off the runners, inspect them and apply the recommended lube today. I left the engine oil draining overnight, beause despite being warm it was very thick and very, very black.
Today was a non-day job day, but I had to take my car in for a service then collect it (it's on PCP finance so I can't do it myself unfortunately) so that cost me time (and a lot of money
) but just before I started work I took this pic showing the Extradig reach:
Bear in mind the sideshift has been left with the kingpost over to the far right side in this pic!
The engine took about 9 litres of oil to bring the dipstick level to max by the end of the day, so somewhere there's posssibly 2 litres of old oil still in the engine. I think I'll be doing another oil change in around 50 hours of run time...
Moving on to the Extradig slides it soon became apparent that at some point rather than replace with stock plastic, or upgraded brass, parts someone had welded on some steel plate and blocks:
They could have at least used angle rather than strip for the runners, because they way they did it left about a 3mm at best (1mm at worst) wide opening between the horizontal and vertical slides. Cleaning them out was really time consuming.
With steel on steel contacts, bang went the plan to use the recomended lube (Waxoyl), and I resorted to brushing on about 500ml of grease to all the contact surfaces. I guess I'll be cleaning and lubing it rather more frequently then.
Tomorrow is another day-job day, so I'll probably only get time to tackle the slew gearbox oil, but then I should really be ready to put her to use!