1987 JCB 3CX Sitemaster 2WD

[Slooby]

Was the hydraulic oil a milky colour? If so then there has been water in the system and that could explain the filter collapse

Not that I recall, wasn't emulsified at any rate, just a little bit murky where I pulled out the filter remains, and it probably dumped some of the unfiltered fluid to the bottom of the housing. The fluid that came out of the filter was slightly grubby, but still clear honey coloured.

[Slooby]

And in todays adventures....

First off a pic of the correctly configured Fuel Filter set up as fitted yesterday:



First job of the day was to fix the broken coolant header tank mounting; with no welder to hand (save a 60's arc welder which I've never learned how to use) I took a piece of inch wide by 3/16ths thick steel plate and drilled a 10mm hole in it for the fixing point on the extra long thermostat housing stud, the drilled and tapped 3 x M6 threaded holes to allow me to bolt it to the old bracket. I used button head stainless fixings with pleanty of threadlock to attach them to the old bracket. Should do the trick:



With that job done it was on to draining the fuel tank as I knew the hose to the sediment drop out trap was pretty tired and had started weaping. Draining the tank took an age, I'd say I got around 80 litres of red diesel out of it...so much for a working fuel sender then, it said empty on the gauge...Tank drained and I took of the tank to sediment trap hose off, it pretty much fell apart in my hands:




Thankfully I had some 3/8ths bore fuel hose and clips left over from mucking about with the Yanmar Excavator we had been borrowing, so as it's a gravity feed I'm not too worried about going to a non-swaged set up here:

[Slooby]

Sediment trap removed and emptied of more emulisifed gloop, water and filthy fuel:



That's a bit of paper towel in the top right corner that I had used to scoop the gloop out of the trap, the trap looked like this after a quick wipe round and by no means cleaned to my standards:



This is cleaned to my standards:



The dark grey is corrosion pitting of the aluminium from all the water left in there.

With the Sediment Trap cleaned and reassembled I turned my attention to cleaning out the mechanical delivery pump having discovered that doing so is part of the service schedule while reading up on fuel system bleeding.

There is meant to be a gause filter inside the pump, this is what was left of it:



You can just see the remains of the brass woven mesh. Lord knows why they put it back in like that, the frame serves no purpose without any mesh present. Just like the rest of the fuel system the pump was full of red emulsified gloop, so when I get her up and running again I think some injector cleaner treatment is going in the tank...I really fear for the state of the injector pump...

Fuel system done and re-assembled I started to refil the tank with our portable electric pump that we used for moving heating oil between our old and new tank, got about 5 litres into the 80 in the 45 gallon drum I had decanted it to and the pump packed up...joy...another job to do before actually getting to drive her and doing the oil change!

[Slooby]

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!

[Slooby]

Oh, and in extending the Extradig boom I figured out what the Hydra-lock lever to the right of the excavator console does...

It releases the Hydra-clamps



Which might also explain why is doesn't lock into the 'unlock' position, because of course you don't want to inadvertantly leave the side shift unlocked...

[Slooby]

Got a little bit done today, between work and rain showers, went to drain off the water from the slew gearbox:



Ummm, yeah

Scratch that, decided to drain the slew gearbox and refill with fresh clean oil. Problem was that the brown sludge wasn't exactly flowing out, so I poured in a little heating oil hoping it would help thin it down, only it didn't really. My dad was trying to persuade me to try the air line on it, I wasn't keen because of the orifice in the in plate that sits above the drain plug and expecting it to fan sludge all over the place if I did.

After an hour of it slowly dripping the oil out I gave in on the air line idea, kinda, and dug out an old paraffin gun to spray in some heating oil in the hope it would help...unsurprisingly it sprayed back out the filler mostly over me. Then I put the platic filler plug back in and removed the breather cap, then through the much smaller breather hole I was able to spray some heating oil in and that did the trick.

To be sure I put the drain plug back in and poured in a couple of litres of heating oil then, repeated the filler plug and paraffin gun trick, a bit of parafin came out around the king post which makes me wonder if there is a functional seal in there, so I stopped and removed the drain plug. This time it all drained out pretty fast, but I've left it to drain overnight to be sure. With any luck this will have done the trick and I'll have got all that emulsified oil out by morning.

In other news, this arrived today:



1985 vintage

I intend to scan it and upload it to the downloads section, but our scanner here is a bit rubbish (it has a dead strip) and the book is A5 format with many, many pages, so it might take me a while! I may have to break it down into the 9 sections to make a simpler job of it.

[gecko.cx]

I'm not sure what is worse - when I drained mine, it flowed alright, but there was nothing in the slew box other than water.
Also, I hope your Parts List is better than mine (P8) - it's a a great set of drawings, but it doesn't resolve to useful part numbers.

[Slooby]

I'm not sure what is worse - when I drained mine, it flowed alright, but there was nothing in the slew box other than water.

When I cracked the drain plug there was an initial gush of water and I momentarily did a 'yay!' then the emulsified oil started to gloop out and 'booo!' was the thought.

More has come out overnight, so I'm wondering if I need to leave it to drain a little while longer just in case

Also, I hope your Parts List is better than mine (P8) - it's a a great set of drawings, but it doesn't resolve to useful part numbers.

It's the same:



All the text does is refer to the drawing number that relates to each model of machine. As I understand it the idea is that you use the drawing reference number and then the indicated item number on the drawing to go to you JCB dealer and say I want this bit; so for example if I wanted a rear wiper blade for a 3CX I would quote them Drawing C1-1-2 Item 7. So somewhere out there there must be a written parts list where you can related the drawing and item number to a part number! I bet for something from the 80's the period record will be on Mircofiche I guess though people like Vicary Plant have this all digitized and up to date though.

Despite all this the drawings are still really useful as they do at least indicates what bits are inside where on every assembly and that really helps when figuring out that you do not take off the bottom plate from the Slew Gearbox unless you want the King Post Shaft to land in your lap followed by the whole excavator arm!

[Slooby]

A couple of rainy days and evenings later and I've finally finished scanning the 200 or so pages of the parts book using our rather tired scanner. All nicely bundled up in a single pdf, which I've just discovered is, at 90.6Mb, is too large to upload to the Downloads section

Still, after my numpty moment earlier (see my thread about the Shuttle issue) I have at least been able to drive the JCB today, and move some soil around with the front loader...tomorrow it will be time to venture out into the field and take out some trees...

[Slooby]

All the machines came out to play today:



Youngest nephew on the dumper, brother-in-law on the Fergie and me in the JCB

The Fergie is going to need some love after its nose met with a fallen tree hidden in some brambles which pushed in the grill and centre piece cracking the badge

The JCB did well, although there is a lot of play in the slew gearbox which it did spit some oil out:



So that may need some attention in the future, Looking at how it goes together I am going to have to be very careful about supporting the excavator arm!

I have a lot to learn to get proficient with the levers and not arbitrarily send things off in random directions, and my grading needs a lot of practice.

I did wonder if there is a bit of a hydraulic power issue as the excavator did seem to stall fairly easily, far more so than I would have expected for such a big machine, either that or Goat Willow roots are really strong!