First, a very good story from Mr. Ritchie Leslie, Ont., Canada - thank you!

How I got the tractor:

I have a late model DB990 which I have owned for about four or five years. I think it's called a "selectamatic" model as it is in the white paint scheme with Case (not David Brown) logos on the side of the hood. It's the first tractor I have owned myself and my previous exposure to tractors was mainly Massey Ferguson 35's/135's/165's when I worked as a school kid on a dairy farm in Scotland in the early 1970's. About 15 years ago we bought a 85 acre hobby farm north of Toronto and borrowed our farmer friend's International tractor when we needed one until I took the plunge and bought the David Brown five years ago.

Repairs:

Getting it going properly:

When we bought the tractor it was clear that like many old machines it had been neglected for a while before the owner traded it in. We bought it from a dealer for $5000 Canadian including a fairly new John Deere rotary brush mower. As part of the deal the dealer replaced the water pump, drivers' seat and the battery as these were all shot. The dealer also freed the PTO clutch for us as this had seized up due to lack of use. The engine ran great, started well, clutch was OK and the body work was in good shape, indicating that it had been kept under cover for most of its life. And it came with the original owners manual, which has saved my bacon on several occasions.

First thing we had to do was to fix the right hand brake. The linkage from the pedal to the brake mechanism was missing and I found one through a wrecker's yard (Fawcett Tractor Supply in St Mary's, Ontario - they wreck a lot of DB's and are on the web). Then we found that the rotating mechanism that applied pressure to the brake pad was siezed and decided to pull the wheel and final drive mechanism off to free up the brake and replace the pads. Standard parts such as filters, hoses and brake pads are freely available from CASE/IH dealers here in Canada so we did not expect any difficulties. Aha!

First thing we discovered was that the final drive is HEAVY. You need two or three strong people when you pull that sucker off the tractor and you need to pull it out straight as there is a long drive shaft attached to it that fits into a drive gear in the gearbox. Why the DB engineers buried the brakes (an item that requires service) inboard of the final drive beats me. We had a service manual (again bought on the web) that told us how to do this job. Main thing to remember is that you MUST wire the differential lock pedal down before you take the final drive off to ensure that the gearbox internals are all held in place.

Here's our first big lesson. Don't touch the gear levers when the final drive shaft is out of the gearbox. I was stupid enough to bump into the main gear lever. When we tried to put everything back we found that the gear into which the long drive shaft was supposed to go was now sitting at 45 degrees and we could not push the one metre shaft back in!! We had to make a special tool out of long, thin piece of steel to re-seat the gear cog before we could re-insert the final drive.
We also replaced all the filters - oil, diesel and hydraulic - and changed all of the fluids (including the gear oil in the final drives) at the same time.

Repair No. 2 - hydraulics

A year later the 3 point hitch started to act up. After using an implement for half an hour or more it would suddenly refuse to lift anymore. After all sorts of messing about, reading manuals and testing the pump output we finally tried replacing the cable that connects the hydraulic controls to the 3 point hitch top link. Bingo - problem solved. The cable cost $50 at the Case/IH dealer.

Repair #3 - electrics

This took ages. The Lucas company is rightfully called the prince of darkness. This spring, while working in the field, the hydraulic and ignition warning lights came on and stayed on at all engine rpm's. Tested the generator (dynamo) - all OK. I'd already replaced both the generator and starter with re-built units a couple of years ago. Tried replacing the diode on the ignition light - no change. To access the electrical wiring and voltage regulator you need to remove the hand throttle assembly and remove the four bolts at the bottom of the steering column so you can move it backwards. THEN you can remove the dash and turn it over on the right. No need to remove the tach drive cable.

Finally traced this after much testing and following of the wiring diagram to (1) bad voltage regulator and (2) a corroded wiring connector. We also found that the steering gearbox was empty of oil so it is now much easier to steer!

Today:

Everything seems to be running fine and I enjoy my tractor. My biggest complaints are that some maintenance items on the machine are hard to reach (e.g. voltage regulator & brakes buried) and that it is hard to start in the winter. Below about 3-5 deg centigrade I use a block heater for a while and at minus 20 deg centigrade it has to be plugged in for several hours before starting. As we use the tractor for snow blowing this is important. My 92 VW Jetta diesel starts quite happily at minus 20 with NO block heater!

The tractor earns its keep in mowing, trailer pulling, some logging in the bush and snow blowing. Plus there is always something to fix on it! The rad hoses are looking very cracked so that is probably the next job......

Ritchie Leslie
Ont., Canada