1938 WC

I am helping my son restore a WC. Regarding where the crank connects to the motor. The rod coming from the motor has a hole where something is suspose to go for the crank to engage. What should it be? A bolt? A pin? Any assistance is appreciated.

Tim

Are you talking about the shaft in front, so you can hand start the engine? The shaft should have a pin on the inside where it catches on the front engine pulley. It also should have a pin on the outside (front of the tractor), where the hand crank will engage it. If you missing the outside (front) pin, a bolt will work fine. For safety reasons the inside one should be replace with a proper pin if it is missing. These pins are only necessary IF you intend on hand starting the tractor.

Reading between the lines a little bit, you should do some searching of the archive on how to properly hand start a tractor. The Allis tractors properly timed tend to be a bit more forgiving than the Farmall counter parts, but both can cause serious injury if an improper technique is used. If this tractor is a fairly new acquisition you might be better off pull starting it until you are sure it is timed properly and running correctly.

bjb has some excellent advice, hand cranking can be risky. My styled WC's have a spring to disengage the Quill shaft, I don't know about the unstyled ones. Tractors are beautiful machines,but like women, can be dangerous if not handled with respect!

I'm also helping my son with an AC WC - a 37.
The advice on pull starting this at first is great advice. We started out trying to crank ours and never even got a pop out of her, only a sore back! We were not sure if we had a mag problem or what.
We tryed a bunch of things and ended up messing up the timing order.
We then pull started it and got her running, rough but running. After correcting the timing and tweeking things it now starts easily by cranking and runs great.
Here's how we start it when cold.
(I wired a kill switch to the mag contacts so my son would have a way to shut her down from the seat just in case.)
With the switch in the kill (off) position, we give her about two revs with the choke on.
Then with the switch switched to run, we crank it by pulling up, not pushing down and she takes off.
I always stress to my son to make sure its in nuetral, and never wrap your thumb around the crank handle. I also don't like to push downward on the crank. If it would prefire and you were pushing down with locked elbows you could end up with a crank handle in the head and/or a broken wrist or arm.
As an aside we also had to pound out the oil pan. Our tractor has seen aome rough treatment and the front of the pan was dented to the point where the No. 1 conrod was scraping the inside of the pan. We have a few repairs to make yet including replacing the seal on the rt final drive, replacing a tube in one of the front tires, trying to get first gear to work, and draining the fluid out of the rear tires.
Good luck getting yours going.