No Work Session for Rail-Mower in February

Had to leave the rail-mower at home for the February 18 work session, unfortunately, due to forecasts of heavy and continued rain.  Full details on my work session blog.  Discovered during a pre-work session inspection of the engine that the choke knob is vibrating its way out, causing the engine to run richer than the optimum mixture when it has been leaned out.  According to Frank Glatzl, the way the choke cable was run seems to be causing the problem.  We will have to re-align the choke cable so it is a straight shot to the tab on the carburetor that it controls.  At least it sounds fixable.

Final Rail-mower Engine Tweaks Accomplished

Frank Glatzl brought back over the muffler that he repaired this morning.  He had to weld several holes at various bends but it is all fixed up.  We then proceeded to take the old starter-generator off the rail-mower.  To my chagrin, I found upon removing the replacement from its patently inadequate shipping box that one of the mounting brackets was broken, undoubtedly during shipment.  We decided to try to swap out that end of the replacement s-g with the one on the old s-g.  We were able to get the old s-g apart, but when we took the replacement s-g apart it was designed slightly differently.  Plus a mounting terminal stud was stripped, rendering it less than ideal.  The replacement s-g's internal parts didn't even look to be in as good condition as the original.  We couldn't get the stripped stud off so we decided to put the old s-g back together and back on the rail-mower since at least it would start the rail-mower.  The replacement s-g is probably going to the scrap heap unless there are some parts we want to hold onto.

To our great surprise, when Frank put his 12v circuit-tester on the newly reinstalled original starter-generator after starting up the engine, it showed the generator was generating 12v for the first time since we began testing it.  Evidently the act of taking it apart and putting it back together fixed some internal problem.  We therefore now we have a functioning starter-generator.  The Wisconsin S-12D engine,was purring nicely.  Frank hooked up the breather tube so everything is now the way it should be on the engine.  We did notice a screw on the starter that needs to be tightened so I will tighten it once the ground dries out.

Only other tweaks to be done are to take off the mower deck and install some additional washers under the pivot pulley.  The belt appears to be too high on the pulley, allowing it to jump off easily.  That's a fix we will work on probably before the March 17 work session.  For now I plan to bring the rail-mower to the February 18 work session at Llano.  We will run it down to Kingsland and hopefully cut a bunch of grass between the rails.  I may install a different cover on the discharge chute before then to test it out.  I also still have to sandblast the engine hood and install it so there's still work to be done but the hard part is over.