Posted by LenNH on December 30, 2009 at 15:45:45 from (71.192.137.159):
A while back, somebody who had bought an F-12 mentioned the automatic wheel brakes. I wrote something to the effect that they were used on all Farmalls until the letter-series came out, and that their primary purpose (in my opinion) was to allow "square turns" in cornfields. If you weren't driving tractors in the early 1940s, you probably haven"t seen "checkrowed" corn. Farmers in my grandfather's and father"s day used planters with trip wires that spaced the corn hills all the way across the field (this "trip wire" was really a series of links with a wire knot at the point where it was supposed to trip the planter mechanism). Before you could plant, you had to stake this wire at one end and carry the rest of it on a reel that was hung on the planter. At the far end of the field, you staked the wire and set the reel off in the fence row. To start planting, you dropped the wire into a y-shaped lever that was on the planter. That tripped the planting mechanism at spaced intervals. At the end of the row, you had to dismount, take the wire out of the lever, turn around, move the stake at the end and move it over two rows, then put the wire back in and do this over and over until the field was done. Supposedly, the corn was planted "square," and it should have been possible to cultivate in either direction. My recollection is that "square" was a relative term, because the wire was difficult to get equally tight every time you pulled its stake out of the ground, moved the really heavy wire (it"s as long as the field!) and reinserted the stake, so it had a slight curvature that wasn"t always the same (this would change just a little bit the points where the hills were dropped in succeeding rows). Still, it WAS possible to cultivate crosswise. The Farmall was designed to do this, AND it was designed to turn "square" at the end, THROUGH the corn, without knocking it down. Of course, if you had an open headland, you didn't need to worry about this, but if you wanted to get as much corn in as possible (a concern on small eastern farms), there wasn't any empty headland. Your choice was just to turn and knock down some corn, or learn to turn the tractor around IN the corn. The old IHC Farmall brochures had pictures of this, and that's where I learned to do this kind of turn with my father's F-12 and 2-row cultivator. I learned many years later that neighbors were all astonished to see an 11-year old kid who didn't knock any corn down. Unfortunately, I was never able to turn that little skill into making any money. I didn't need it for very long, anyhow, because farmers discovered that all that folderol about checkrow planting was unnecessary. In the early 40s, my father and his neighbors began to "sow" their corn. All it took was moving some kind of lever on the corn planter so that the wheels turned the planting mechanism and dropped the corn seeds in a row. We continued to cultivate, but in one direction only. When the corn got big enough that you wouldn"t cover it up with the dirt from the cultivator teeth, we put on "shovels" that threw enough dirt up in the middle of the row to get most of the weeds--for a while. Eventually, the corn shaded out most of the weeds--but not all. There came a moment when cultivating would tear out roots that had spread out, so you just let grow whatever weeds were there at that point. I have to say that as a youngster who would do anything to drive a tractor, cultivating was one of my favorite jobs. It was fairly quiet, because you could run the tractor in a higher gear and throttle it back, the corn field was smooth, and there was time to think about whatever you wanted to.
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Today's Featured Article - Gatherin of the Orange - by Rick Nikolich. In July of 1998 I was talking to fellow Allis Chalmers collector Mike Schilling about the annual "Gathering of The Orange" AC show coming up in August of 1999. He got this wild idea that we should get a convoy of AC tractors and drive them from Charlotte, Michigan 105 miles to LaGrange, Indiana.
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