First work with my 40c

Zachary Hoyt

Well-known Member
I acquired this John Deere 40c crawler in May of 2015 in trade for a wood strip canoe I had built. I was building a bigger and more comfortable canoe at the time, and I saw the crawler on Craigslist, about 6 miles away, being offered for trade. I was also in the middle of building a barn at the time, so I didn't work on it at all till the following December. It ran but only the right track had power. I took off the loader assembly and hydraulic pump and homemade ROPS and replaced the left bull gear and worked on the left steering clutch with help from Lavoy and others at jdcrawlers.com. Last March I had the final drive and track back on and began to work on the winch, but again got distracted with things. Today I finally put it to work for the first time hauling out the butt log of an oak tree, 20" diameter at the top of the first 8' log. It did better than I had thought it might, even going up a grade in the woods. There was a bit of snow on the ground so the log didn't tear up the dirt. I have to make an idler to keep the chain tight on the old homemade winch and then I should be able to start using it to pull out logs and maybe keep the front end of the log up a bit. I had this log on a long chain because I didn't have a good place to hook it up, but once I get the cable and a choker back on the winch it'll be handier. I just wanted to see how well it would pull. Partway home the engine died but would restart after a minute and run briefly, so I figured it was a gas problem. I found out there's no flow out of the tank outlet, so I'll have to clean that out but for tonight I hooked it up with a temporary hose and tank hung off the air cleaner with a coat hanger wire. It looked pretty goofy but it got me home. I ran out of gas in the little tank behind the sugar house, but I was only about 100 feet from the sawmill building by that time so it wasn't such a long walk. I cut down the oak tree to get 4-8" diameter pieces from the top to inoculate with shiitake mushroom spawn, which has to be done at this time of year, and the bigger parts will get cut into boards at the sawmill and sold. It was a nice day in the woods and I figured I'd post some pictures.
Zach
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Must be the angle of the sun in those first four pictures, worst looking JD green paint job ever!.

Zach, I hope you find that 40 as handy as we find ours! Ours is not a crawler, but will do just about every job we give it, and pretty good on gas.
 
Yes, the crawler has a truly awful paint job. I got it that way. It's still got a lot of cosmetic and convenience issues that I should try to sort out over time, now that I know it can
do some work. The Farmall 300 in the first four pictures has almost no paint on it at all, and though I have done a lot of mechanical work on it since 5 years ago when I got it I
have never tried to do anything about the paint. I keep them both inside, but I think they'd been out for a long while before I got them.
Zach
 
My neighbor has one of these and you think YOU have rebuilt something? My neighbor has a full two car garage with tons and tons of tools he was a mechaic and the the dealer service writer. His is a fourty with the four roller tracks . End of track is almost to the front of the radiator. He also has that super heavy front grill. I sand blasted it for him. He and the next door neighbor own it together. After he spent the entire winter in his heated garage ripping it apart and fixing everything but the gas cap:). Beauty of a paint job etc. Next the two of them thought how about we put a blade on this thing? They find some place up in Pennsylvania that has parts. There are three types of blades for these machines. Single cylinder light duty. Single cylinder medium duty. Dual cylinder heavy duty 6 way blade brute. Ovee coarse they would get the middle one. The six way was more than twice the price. I look at the two of them and say no no you will buy 5he big one. Two days later I walk over to my neighbors and sure enough there is the six way. Man is this poor thing worn out,!!!!! Every pivot pin and bushing is egg shape. Rotten hoses. Cylinders leak. They were just going to put it on and the heck with it. No no I said you will never be happy. Just suck it uo and fix it. All new bushings, hoses, rebuilt cylinders, etc. They now have a very nice little #40 toy with the super duper six way blade. Cute little brute. Still runs like a John Deere. The engine is two cylinder.why didnt they make it run smooth instead of a Deere? I dont have any pictures handy. I will need to walk over tomorrow. Was on the cover of green machine a few years back.
 
I don't have the time or money to do a proper rebuild of anything, I just do the minimum that's required to get it back to work. I'll keep pecking away at it a little at a time.
Zach
 
We've been growing them for our own use for 12 years or so, and last year we ended up inoculating more logs than we needed so we sold the surplus, and could have sold more if we'd had them. To inoculate we use the sawdust spawn method. 5.5 pounds costs $40 delivered and last year it was enough to do 60 logs. I drill holes in a diamond pattern, then the spawn gets pushed in with a plunger-type tool and then hot wax is brushed over to seal the hole. It has to be done within a week or two of when the tree is cut for best results, in order to avoid other fungi getting in there first. The logs then sit outside for up to a year, and once they're fully myceliated the logs can be soaked every 7-8 weeks, and about a week after the soak they'll produce mushrooms. Cornell and UVM have recently put out a very complete explanation of the whole process at the link below.
Zach
Mushroom cultivation
 
My Dad just passed last January and left us a 1957 420c. I had it out to push a little snow while we were in Montana over Christmas. Lost power to the right track so I guess eventually I'll be pulling it apart to replace the drive on that side. It spit a lot of oil out the stack so I'm assuming it will need a rebuild also, hopefully just rings but who knows until opened up. I might just be opening up a can of worms but Dad found it handy to have around the farm so I might too.
 

That log must weigh more than the crawler! Have you thought of building an arch for hauling logs? We used to see them abandoned out in the woods when snowmobiling.
 

A logger up here in NNY has a 40C with a blade.He clear cuts only when asked to so the 40 is very handy making a road and getting through the woods and not tearing things up too badly.He has skidded out some monster logs with that little work horse.He has all the big machines for the big jobs as well.
 
They used to use those in the mountains of West Virginia. Skidding down the steep slopes, they were capable of pulling 20 tie logs behind'em. Looked like a long snake coming down the skidtrail. Logs were held together by 'grabs' driven in, then knocked out by a 'grabskipper' at the landing. Caution: get the crawler sideways on a snowy slope & each cleat becomes a sledrunner & you're on a runaway sled with terrible results!
 

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