Tales of O- My repair thread-1963 "O"

[jbrewer]

..... I sure am slow!

Sometimes I look at this thing and question my sanity, but it's interesting to fix stuff, and I don't "idle" well. Sure sounds smooth now.

The housing is an interesting design. You can only put the end caps on one way, and only on the correct end, or they won't go together. One end housing has a notch and a tab, the other has a pin and a hole. A simple thing, but I appreciate the engineers who designed it this way 60 years ago.

Which after all, is part of the enjoyment of these old things.

Thanks for the nice words. It'll be purty painted the Right Yellow!

John

[jbrewer]

Thanks to Allen and Jenn, who I both had the pleasure of meeting yesterday and talking cubs over lunch, and Duke who had an "extra", I got a replacement trans for the O to use while I see if I can rebuild the original transmission with the spare parts I have.

I spent some time cleaning it up, and removing the axle housing and cleaning the brake and drum.

THEN I got to power wash the sidewalk after I unleashed a hidden pocket of HyTran that was still lurking in there. Man is that stuff... pungent... and persistent. Some of the dregs of it were almost like chocolate syrup. I still have some more internal cleaning to do, but the trans looks in very good shape (thanks Duke!).

Having carried it from the back of my Jeep and wrestled it around the back of the garage today, I can can tell you it's also heavy.

Now to order some gaskets... It'll be great to have an O with more than 1st gear only!

On to the pictures!





John

PS: Thanks again to Jenn and Allen and Duke!

[ACecil]

Great pics, John! It was a pleasure to meet, and help you out!

[Methos]

Originally Posted by ACecil

Great pics, John! It was a pleasure to meet, and help you out!

Same here! I hope we'll get a chance to meet one of these days. Allen told me anything more then 1st gear your wasting fuel!

Eric hooked me up with this rear end last year. I'm glad it went to a good where it will be used.

[cub1450]

So that's how the O brakes work.I guess we learn something everyday .

[jbrewer]

Well, good news and bad news.

The bad news is I'm going to have to repair the broken gears in an O transmission after all, the good news is that the set I got off Ebay for cheap are all perfect. Actually it seems like I'm going to have 1.75 sets so I'll probably have enough parts to repair both transmissions.

I took the reduction gear housing off the trans I got from Duke via Allen and all looks good in there. The idea of disassembling the trans looks less scary now that I've stared at it some.

Has anyone actually taken an Originals trans completely apart?

I'll take plenty of pictures.

John

[Methos]

John it seems like you can't seem to get a easy fix.

[ACecil]

It'll work out, John!

[jbrewer]

I got a couple hours to play today and got the trans stripped down a bit.

A couple of observations. The bearing retainers are NOT easy to remove. I guess having been in there since dirt was young probably helped but man were those things a bear to get out. Also, the illustration in the manual depicting how to get the differential out to clear the housing was very helpful. Even with that I had to finagle it a lot to find the secret configuration which allowed it to clear the housings. The bearings actually looked quite good... very little wear and zero leakage from the seals.

Not bad for a 50 year old piece of gear.

You can see the missing tooth on what appears to be first gear. There's a matching missing tooth on the gear it engages, but the spares I have are perfect. How in the world can you shear off a solid steel gear with 7HP??? (see 2nd left most gear in the 1st picture). It's amazing how smoothly the whole thing spun .... very little drag. I hope it's that smooth when I put it back together.

Now for some more cleaning and removal of the transmission bits to replace the gears. Thank God for cheap rubber gloves... this is one messy project.

John

[ACecil]

Nice progress on the tranny, John! Thanks for the pics.