A good tractor story.

Two years ago I bought a lot of items from an estate. I have been working on cleaning it up every since then. The end is in site and each weekend brings a new find and a story to go with it.
After World War II anything new was tough to come by. Bill didn’t want to wait for a newer bigger tractor so he did the next best thing. He made one. He had this old Moline rear end that was in good condition but the motor was worn out. I’m not sure how he found it or made the connection, but he ended up with a Navy surplus motor out of a landing craft. Not sure if it was in a Higgins style boat or just exactly what. The motor is a six cylinder gasoline Hercules light weight (for the time) the base is a magnesium/aluminum material, cast iron blocks and flat head, dual ignition with two spark plugs in each cylinder. After a winter of making a frame, getting everything to match up and work right the big day came. Bill fired the tractor up and put it in reverse to back it out of the shop … but it went forwards. While trying to figure out what was wrong he noticed the cooling fan was running backwards. Not sure why but this motor runs backwards, so the tractor only had one gear forwards. It was driven out to the hedge row and parked where it set until several weeks ago. I was supposed to get this tractor, but Bills grandson decided he would like to have it and get it running. There are no hard feelings on my part and I sure hope he gets it running because I think this is a REAL conversation piece.

Most Higgins boat LCVP's used two Gray Marine (Detroit) 671's, while the bigger ones used three or four 671's. That gasoline Herc probably came from an earlier landing craft.

Looks like the guy did a nice neat job building the frame and mating the trans to the engine. Too bad that didn't work out. I know the feeling of working hard to do something to find out it was all for nothing, it scuks.

If it was built to run that way can't you change the pinion in the rear end to run the opposite way? I've heard on here even that when restoring tractors some have been put back together so they run backwards.
AC reversed the travel on the WC to make rear loaders work and turned the seat around.

I'm not much on powered watercraft but I was told most twin prop boats have opposite running engines for whatever reason. I ran into it once by an owner of a business who trashed his twin 350s on a cabin cruiser by sucking up mud in his cooling systems. He thought I was joking when I tried to turn one of them over and said "Here's whats wrong its running backwards!" Needless to say he didn't have me work on it. :-<

We get a lot of core 427 Fords from old Chris Craft boats with twins, and the second one is reverse rotation. Not that difficult to convert, standard cam, etc., worst part on that one is the cuts on the rear seal surface of the crank are backwards, so it'll migrate oil out instead of in

They run one backwards because of the prop pull, boat will pull hard when all of the props push the boat the same way, counter rotation eliminates this pull. Changing the cam and starter should turn it the other way.

There's a lot of buried treasures around the farms that they have. I will be on the look out for that tractor at the K&O shows in the future.