Had a tractor to fix, a mechanical/hydraulic problem. it'd been in the workshop over the weekend so that's a day & half witout the heater on in the workshop. We discovered it had done this. under that ice is a rad filler neck! Water pump locked up, hoses as hard as rock, bugger!

ooh, are tractor engines as delicate as car engines? or will that melt and be fine?

Much bigger & heavier, all-iron pushrod, just a similar thing bigger but it matters little, if the ice has nowhere to expand to it'll make room! We built a cardboard tent around the engine & pointed the space heater at it, got it hot enough to lift the temp gauge a couple of notches! I was worried & we could'nt run till I'd fixed the problem it came in for so once melted we drained it so it could'nt do it again. A few days on I've finished the job & happy to say it looks like they've got away with it, run up to temp today & nothing seems amiss!

A slight leak.


Our 10 tonne fork lift has a slight water leak, we top it up every day, so it has no antifreeze in it. It also has no core plugs in it now.

Lucky escape on that tractor engine then!

Apparently it had an overheating problem in the summer due to a blocked radiator & got topped up a fair bit with water & then forgot about. This has few core plugs either as it's wet-lined & doesnt need them so the ice could'nt have pushed them out. I'm glad it was'nt in for something cooling related as we'd been more responsible for it, my job was at the other end so we're in the clear!

if i dint know better gazza i would say that ice is from a burst supply to some cabins
adj to concast on tata steel scunthorpe

That's because I took the photo yesterday as I was driving round to the LAF1 and 2 control room