The engine from Number Twelve came out on a Wednesday. Earl did not own a proper engine hoist anymore; he had sold it when he closed the shop. So he built a frame from heavy timbers and a chain hoist he borrowed from a neighbor, and he and Ray lifted the engine free together on a cold Saturday morning, their breath steaming in the shed, the chain clinking link by link as the engine rose out of the frame like something being pulled from a well.
Even then, he did not just bolt it into Thirty-One. He tore it down first. Not all the way. The bottom end was sound, and the compression numbers had been good. But he pulled the oil pan and checked the bearings. He pulled the head and checked the valves and the gasket surfaces. He measured the cylinder bores at the top, middle, and bottom of the stroke. He replaced the water pump, which had a slight wobble in its shaft. He replaced the thermostat, every hose, every belt. He had the injectors tested at a diesel shop in town, where the owner, a man half his age, raised his eyebrows when Earl explained what he was doing.
"Building one tractor out of three?" the young man said. "Out of that rental fleet? I heard about that. Somebody bought the whole lot for a thousand bucks."
"Somebody did," Earl said.
The young man looked at him for a moment, then grinned. "That was you?"
"How long on those injectors?"
"Two days."
"I'll be back Friday."
---
The hydraulics from Number Seven were the most delicate part of the job, and Earl saved them for last.
He removed the pump, the main control valve, the lift cylinders, the auxiliary valves and every line and fitting, and laid them out on the bench in the order they would go back in. He disassembled the pump and inspected the gears and the housing for scoring. He disassembled the control valve, a heavy block of machined metal with spools, springs, check valves and passages so precise that a single grain of sand could ruin them. He cleaned each component with solvent and lint-free rags, inspected it under a magnifying lamp, measured what could be measured, and checked every reading against the service manual.
And then he found the line he had boxed in his notebook weeks earlier: the hydraulic line from the pump to the control valve, which on Number Seven used the later angled fitting.
Ray, who happened to be there that afternoon, picked up the line from Number Seven and held it up beside the matching port on Thirty-One's frame.
"It looks like it fits," he said.
"It'll go on," Earl said. "It'll even seal, for a while. The angle's off by about eight degrees. Put it under pressure and vibration for a few hundred hours, and the fitting fatigues. Then it cracks."
"So what do you do?"