So I'm thinking that it would be advantageous to document here my experiences with the TM12T and associated issues that I have had to address if for no other reason than to provide a recorded reference that may help someone else down the road who may find themselves working with this machine as well.
So to date, I have no regrets purchasing this machine. It has worked and performed with great satisfaction. I have concerns that the engines may not be originals to the crane but without documentation I have no way to know for certain or not. The truck engine is an inline 6 cylinder and I believe it is an International Harvester diesel. The crane engine is a Ford 300 inline 6. Any info I have been able to garner, which has been very little, shows the crane to be a 6 wheel drive. At the time of purchase I was told that the forward drive shaft had been removed because the previous owner kept twisting it off. Some story about possible gear changes in the front differential that mismatched the original manufactures gears. I have no evidence of this however this last weekend, addressing a clutch issue with the crane I discovered there is no transfer case to get power to the forward differential. There IS a forward differential but even if I had the drive shaft, there is no where to hook up the other end. Very weird is all I can say.
When I purchased the crane I was informed that the mechanical fuel pump was inoperable on the Ford 300 and they used an electric pump to demonstrate the crane when I was looking at it for purchase. Not knowing that a new mechanical fuel pump could be had I bought and installed an electric fuel pump to install permanently and it has been working just fine since that time.
This last Friday I went to reposition the crane at a job site we are working on (shown in the pics above) and ran into a new issue. The clutch would not fully disengage the pressure plate when depressing the clutch pedal. I discovered that this system uses master/slave hydraulic cylinders to control the throw out bearing. This system works exactly like a brake system works on nearly all vehicles and uses DOT 3 as the hydraulic fluid. Observation showed that when depressing the clutch pedal the slave cylinder would extend about half it's travel. Worse I found that I could manually push the 'push rod' back into the cylinder itself indicating that the fluid was bleeding off somewhere. I could find no evidence of DOT 3 leaking anywhere in the path and I was able to find out that the slave cylinder had been replaced a year ago. This lead me to assume that the master cylinder was hemorrhaging internally. Being a '64 truck crane I could not find a source for another master cylinder so spent this weekend going through about 200 different master brake cylinders and found one that very closely resembled the original and was in stock (O'Reilly Auto Parts). I picked it up, made some minor modifications to mounting holes, and installed and bled it and it is now working perfectly.
I learned this weekend that the previous owner found a bunch of documentation that came with the crane when he purchased it and all that is now being mailed to me via snail mail. Can't wait to get it.
