Posted by LenNH on October 30, 2008 at 12:34:43 from (24.61.134.129):
How about writing about what it was like to use old tractors on farms?
I grew up with 3 F-12 (1 on steel), 2 10-20s (both steel), a Regular, an F-20, an A, a B, and two Hs, plus a 1930 Oliver HP RC on steel. After growing up (at least in my opinion), got to spend enough time on a Super M to get a good feel for it. Should mention that not all these tractors belonged to my father. Some belonged to relatives or neighbors, and I found various ways to get experience with them. Here's my contribution on the McCormick-Deering 10-20, 1929 on steel. Power: horsepower moderate, because the engine is low-compression, for kerosene, and it turns at only 1000 rpm. Torque: huge, because of the size of the engine (281 cubic inches!). Impossible to stall out in second gear with its normal load. Gears: typical for its day: about 2, 3 and 4+ mph. Second gear always called "plowing gear" back then. The tractor would do no heavy work in third gear, because of the enormous waste of engine power through the steel wheels (that's why the rated drawbar horsepower was always about half the rated engine power: 10-20, 15-30, 22-36, etc.). Long, thick gearshift lever made shifting fairly easy, although you knew you had some pretty thick gears sliding through the heavy ooze they used to call gear oil. Steering: heavy and stiff. The "skid rings" on the front wheels did not work very well in plowed ground when a heavy load was behind, because the load at the center of the drawbar tended to keep the tractor going straight. One of the tractors I drove had higher skid rings, and they helped. No wheel brakes on standard tractors in those days. Slowing down in a turn helped a lot because it reduced the load on the drawbar. Platform and controls: Pretty good....considering. A lot of tractors from the 20s and even 30s just put the driver wherever something else wasn't (look at the F-20: the driver sits on a stalk sticking out the back, and there is NO comfortable place for the feet). The 10-20 has a pretty flat platform, except for the PTO shaft housing coming down the center, and the controls are pretty well placed, EXCEPT the governor control, which requires reaching under the steering wheel and to the left of the steering column. Visibility is good on both sides. Governor: typical of the early governors that really work only when the throttle is wide open. The "variable governor" that came in at different times in the 30s (1932 in the case of the F-12) allowed governing over a pretty good range of engine speeds. The older type didn't work well throttled back under varying loads. If the load got lighter, the engine speeded up a lot, and if the load got heavier, the engine would die down too much. Belt work: A real tiger because of all the torque. I've seen the 10-20s work threshers and ensilage choppers and be almost impossible to bog down. A modern tractor like an H, with a small high-speed engine, might even stall out if a thresher or ensilage chopper got overloaded. Ride: Absolutely horrible on gravel roads or a hard farm yard. You had to drive at a crawl in order to stay on. When I went on the road to go to a field, I ran it in low gear at half throttle AND stood up. In the field, on sod, not bad, although you always knew you had lugs punching into the ground (they had a tendancy to dig a little bit as they were pulling, and you could feel that). On plowed ground, fairly comfortable. The big platform allowed standing, too. Reliability: outstanding, as long as you did the required greasing (and hand oiling of the valves). I don't think my father's 10-20 ever had even a valve job in 22 years of working. Of course it wasn't used as much as a modern rubber-tired tractor, so the main use was plowing, disking, threshing and silo-filling. Over the 22 years, probably not a huge number of hours compared to a modern all-purpose tractor (our rubber-tired F-12 was used every day, even in winter because we had to clean the dairy barn no matter what). Noise: Plenty, even though there was a "muffler" of sorts coming out under the gas tank (there were various styles of manifolds used throughout the production of this tractor; ours had this so-called muffler). Would like to read others' experiences with any tractor they've used enough to get very familiar with.
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Today's Featured Article - Picking Corn - by Rick Nikolich. It was the day before Christmas shutdown at work and I asked our lead engineering expert Scott Andrzejewski what he was going to do over the holidays. He said that he had some corn that he still needed to pick with an antique one-row New Idea corn picker. Scott has a nice farm about an hour north of Lansing in St. Johns, MI. He wanted to get the rest of his corn in by the next day (Christmas Eve). We had about an inch of new snow on the ground and single digit temperatures. So in the bac
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