Farmall H air breather

Texaschad25

New User
I picked up a 1943 H about a month ago that had been sitting outside and unused for about 15 years. Changed the plugs, oil, filters, as well as cleaning the fuel tank. Tractor ran decent for a 30 minutes and died. After disassembling the carburetor, I discovered that it was full of sand on the air side. Cleaned it out, put it back on, and now I am afraid of what I am seeing. There is now a small amount of smoke coming out of the blow-by tube. Before this point, I changed out the oil in the bath (which was full of junk), and added new oil. I concluded that the air breather assembly must have a mud dobbers nest in it, so I took it off and bingo, my suspicion was confirmed. Looks like this is a sealed unit with screen in the bottom, so do any of you have a suggestion for cleaning the nests out of it? I feel terrible that this happened, now thinking that my engine has sand in it.

Any help would be much appreciated.
 
I would think you could just melt them out with a
water hose. Just keep washing and blowing until all
the dirt is gone.

I doubt the sand that went into the engine really
did much damage. Those old engines were built
tough... Think how many run for years with no air
filter at all!
 

Set the whole assembly down into a bucket of gasoline or diesel fuel. Let it soak for a few days. Pull it out and let it drain.
Might want to agitate it a bit every so often while it is soaking.
 
How did the sand get through? If every thing was hooked up right the mud dobbers could have only built in intake stack and if pulled into air cleaner the oil in the oil bath should have stopped the sand. The bottom of the intake stack sticks below the top of oil level in oil cup.
 
At some point when the tractor was sitting in the field, somebody had removed the breather tube between the carb and breather, and laid it up on the hood. I cleaned it out but didn't think twice about the breather assembly. And as you mentioned, I have had the assembly soaking in a 5 gallon bucket full of diesel all day.
 
When I worked for Allis Chalmers we would take the metal mesh out by cutting a bit from where it was fastened together and steam clean it along with the engine parts.
 
(quoted from post at 21:26:47 03/31/14) At some point when the tractor was sitting in the field, somebody had removed the breather tube between the carb and breather, and laid it up on the hood. I cleaned it out but didn't think twice about the breather assembly. And as you mentioned, I have had the assembly soaking in a 5 gallon bucket full of diesel all day.

It is possible to drill out some spot welds, and then you can take the whole thing apart, clean all of it, put it back together, and re-spot weld it.
 
Problem solved!!!! As I said earlier, I soaked this thing in fuel for a few days. The I put some small nuts and bolts into the canister from the discharge side and agitated them around in there. WOW.. There was still a TON of sand in that thing! After I got the sand and hardware out of it, I put some degreaser on and in it, hit it for several minutes with the pressure washer and now it's clean as a whistle, inside and out. For good measure, I let it dry out and hit it again with the air hose for good measure. Thank you gentlemen for the tips. I've got a lot of good advice from this site.
 

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