Gator Post: It is time we shared her story
It does not look like much, but it she is a beast!
Three years ago, Sarah's father showed up with a wheeled horse ride on lawnmower and this gator. They came from the Abby where he has served as their mechanic for the last 45 years. At the time, we were not in a good place. We had recently moved to the farm but still owned our house and were desperate for a sale to happen. I had recently been relieved of the misery I called a career at Trinity EMS. Sarah had more recently walked off the job at Trinity.
Living off savings and cashed-in retirement plans, two more projects were not needed, wanted, or tolerable. We had also recently been refused by dad when we asked for money. Now I was resentful that not only could he not help with our mortgage, he was bringing me other peoples problems. I only mention this to explain the next sentence: The two items would sit on the side of the drive for a year while I resented their presence. (that would not have made any sense without the preceding paragraph)
With time, I did begin to imagine how useful the gator would be and finally asked dad to get it running or at least guide me on what needs to be done. Let me throw in that over the twenty years the abby had it, he continually cut out "unnecessary" components that were causing electrical issues. He did find time to help on a day we were knee deep in another project. He did get it running and then informed me that it runs fine. The issue is the batery will not stay charged and then stormed off.
The next day it would not start of course, but I now had it in my mind to be grateful for the gift and get the damn thing in service or get rid of it. I started with the basic tune up, a new battery, and fresh fuel. I cleaned the grime off and lubed every nipple, adjusted the drive chains and belts. That was it. We began driving it and hauling muck and dirt and rocks and firewood and tools for projects and drove to the bus stop and so on. The only issue was that nobody drove it often enough to keep the battery charged. He had convinced them that there was a catastrophic electrical problem so he would not have to continually maintain this old machine. Firetrucks are kept in service 20-30yrs. A gator should not be in service longer.
I did the absolute least amount of maintenance possible. Annual oil changes and semi-annual air filter cleaning. One day I turned the key and it made a weird noise. A gear in the engine stripped. The engine was dead, no compression, no nothing but a spinning sound when you turned the key. After a year and a half of using this thing daily, it became a necessity.
I had spent a few weeks of diagnosing and trying different things, not wanting to admit the blown engine. I finally pulled out the compression tester and found not enough in cylinder 1. This led me to the long search for a replacement. Let me tell you almost nothing is made the way it used to be. The gator was designed to handle more than anything in its class of mini truck. Golf carts looked the same but would be crushed by the weight the gator 6x4 can carry. The Club car would be buried and stuck in the mud and terrain the 6x4 can traverse.
Everything that is currently produced that meet the same weight abilities, like the Toro Workman or the Bobcat Utility Vehicle start at $20,000.00. That is a lot of zeros. With maintenance, that works out to $1200ish a year for 20 years. There is myriad additional reasons why new is not better. Computer controls is the biggest one. I found only a handful of 6x4's nationwide and all were more than a 6 hour drive. Those that did not run were all around $5k. If it ran, they were $8-15k. None of which was feasible at the time. Then the dream. The ultimate in off road capability. The most payload carrying and the most wheels. A full roll bar/brush guard/wall-knocker-downer. The Military John Deer Gator 6x4 diesel. For only $12, 500, I'd consider it a deal at twice the price. Still at half the price, I could not afford it. Also, there appears to be only one guy in CA that gets them from the military to resell. The only option remaining was to rebuild the engine we had. I did also look at rebuilt engines that were $2500 plus a $1k core deposit. We could send our engine in and have it rebuilt which would have eliminated the core charge but increased the turn around time by triple. The final option was to find someone local to rebuild it. That is what I did for $2k.
Lucky Red's Mobile Mechanic is a young man now in Simsbury. He fled CA and somehow ended up in CT. Not the first time I have seen this. I suppose going any further would be detrimental to one's overall health. Well he was willing and able to rebuild the engine.
A couple weeks later it was done. Back in service.
This gator came with the full cab, doors, cabin heater, and windshield wiper. 25 years later, the doors are gone, Dad had bypassed the cabin heater, and most of the cab mounting brackets had rotted. After we got it, Phoebe had crashed and knocked the front windshield out which I replaced "temporarily" with a sheet of plexiglass. The brake foot pedal cable snapped and I removed the hood to attempt repair...we use the parking brake handle to this very day. The hood went on and off over the course of several months and eventually broke. Least of my concerns. The bed had also rotted over the last few years.
Now that the machine was running, I figured it was time to reattach the cab to the gator. About a week earlier, Red had used our welder to fix Nana's truck bumper. I had been terrified of this machine. I thought it was 240v and had no idea how to weld. One of the things I had asked Red to repair was the fender on our 12 foot trailer. Having watched him weld the truck and how to set our little welder, and a few youtube welding videos later, I felt capable to do the welding. I also was realizing I did not have the money to pay for his services so I was going to have to weld the fenders.
From what I have learned, clean surfaces are the most important step. Everything was rotty and rusty. You can see the wire cone on the angle grinder. I used this the most but did need to use a cutting wheel to cut off the rotten edges and the grinding wheel for the really rusty spots. The next step is to clamp everything together which I did not do. Holding the fender in place does not guarantee a close fit. It also leads to fingers getting burned which is not an enjoyable experience.
I do wish I had taken more pictures during the process; before I painted them. I would like to showcase how terrible my welds look. They hold, but not pretty at all. Still it holds and did boost my confidence. Many people that know me might claim additional confidence is completely unnecessary...possibly detrimental to the world's safety.
Given I am now a master welder, tackling the gator cab would be easy. It actually was not all that hard however time consuming. The cab connected at 6 points.
In the picture, I added arrows showing where the cab originally connected. Brackets were welded to the gator frame and the cab bolted onto the brackets. There are two additional attachment points under the windshield which screwed through the dashboard. As I type and think, I realize that I never really looked at the rear attachment points. There might be more work to do. The two brackets under the windshield are in tact but the screws have rattled out from the dancing the disconnected cab had been doing over the previous several months. Meanwhile the connections at the footwell and in the corners above the dash were completely gone. I wanted to keep the corner attachments as far to the outside as possible. Some day I will get better at taking pictures for the blog.
The original corner points were on the inside and connected to a bracket welded onto the outside of the frame I have the arrow connotating. The best spot I could find was the outside right where the arrow is pointing. It did sadden me to grind off original paint that was actually in tact. Just below to the left is a close up of the weld and piece of angle iron I used. Again, sorry I did not get a picture prior to painting. Still you can see that the weld is not terrible and it deffinately holds. I did this on both sides.
In an effort to keep the work from rusting, I
did spray everything right away with primer. Next was the footwell mounting points. I had some 1.5in slotted angle iron that would reach, so I cut two lengths of the metal to weld onto the footwell and then welded the cab corner to the new bracket. The driver side worked but the right side rattled free. Given there were holes in both, I threw a bolt in it and called it a day. There really wasn't enough metal on the cab corner to weld to. It was actually just burning through, hence the hole. The Picture below is of the right side before it broke free. The weld held for a couple days, but when it gave way, it was apparent that there was not enough metal.
The welding was done during the engine break in period, which was explained to Harper whom took it on as her personal mission to get the gator through the break in period. She did not quite understand the decimal point in the engine hour counter and thought she had achieved mission success at 50.3 instead of 53.0. Only one or two full throttle rides before I caught her error. Anyway, she achieved her goal and had shifted from mission-oriented plan-of-action to Joyriding.
She had made several trips up and down the driveway when it stopped.
Harper ran the gator dry. After screaming at her for not checking the machine before she went joy driving, I made her find gas, carry it down, and fill the gator up. It then ran like crap and was bogging down and shutting off. after a hole lot of diagnosing and trying, I finally came to the realization that the fuel pump was probably cooked. Most likely, after 25 years, running dry was the final nail. Replacement china made pumps were $21-$57 on ebay and amazon with a 2-3 day delivery time. Unfortunately for our checkbook, I really needed to know if this was the issue. After so much time and money to get it motoring again, I really did not want to deal with some new major issue. Time was pressing and driving all the way to Torrington was not enticing. I bit the bullet and went to Litchfield NAPA. They had a universal pump for $115.00 and 3/8 low pressure fuel line for $8.50/foot They did not have any low pressure 5/16. So it was 3 feet of injection hose for $16/foot. So $125 later, I had what I needed to get it going.
I replaced all the fuel lines from the tank to the carb. The old line was terrible; all dry rotted. There is a chance that it had hairline cracks and was sucking air into the fuel system. The new pump matched the mounting holes from the old and I replaced all the spring clamps with worm drive hose clamps. After getting the two auxiliary fuel filters filled with fuel, it ran well. I let it idle till it was hot, drove it around with some bogging, shut it down for five minutes, fired it up and drove around another five minutes with a bit of bogging but no shut down.
I asked Colt to drive it today and report back to me how it is doing...I hope for a positive review.
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