I skimmed through the comments of others and would tend to agree with a lot of what was mentioned. I am a part time farmer and cover a couple "short quarters." The tractors I use for much of the field work range in age from 1974 to 1994. The most used tractor is a 4640 with Quad-Range transmission. I picked this up 11 years ago from a retired farmer who put it up for sale on a consignment basis. It was a clean, seemed to be well kept, low hour tractor with just under 5000 hours. Since, it has had the entire rear end gone through and a complete out of frame overhaul to the engine. All of this was not cheap. There are those who might have said I should have scrapped it and bought something newer with what I stuck into it. First, I am not one to send a problem down the road for someone else to face, and secondly, I do not want to be on the receiving end of that type of situation, either. We have some pretty good ideas as to what caused these two major issues on this tractor, as everything about it clearly showed the hours were accurate. This tractor gets used more than any other one as it plants, cultivates (yes, we do still cultivate), hauls grain, gets used on the stalk chopper, and hooked up to the chisel plow from time to time. For what I cover, I have gross overkill on tractors and horsepower, but with the tractors I have, I do have one I can resort to using if another goes down in season. I have a shop I work with where most service work is done, and I try to keep everything in top notch running condition. I think I have the best kept and nicest "fleet" of older equipment around. That said, I think you may want to find a 12 row planter, as there are a ton of Max-Emerge planters out there for a reasonable price, and we still have ours, which was purchased in 1982. It has been rebuilt a few times, and it was rather inexpensive to do so. Your combine choice, I would agree a Titan series (Yellow cab top) would probably be a more suitable choice versus something earlier, as I think the parts for the older 00 series are getting harder to come by. That may also be the case with the Titan series, too. I am not advocating you "overpower" yourself like I have, but with my father's paring down his operation, and my ramping up mine, we have pooled our equipment together. I have about half of the equipment today, and he has the other half. I have been buying and upgrading for the past 12 years whenever we needed something, rather than him. I don't want to end up having to liquidate everything of his at some point in time to settle an estate, and not have something of my own. That is why I have done what I have done, and with the good times we had a few years ago and the years leading up to the peak, I was able to do it. I have scaled back my purchasing and about all I owe on now is the last installment on a new planter I financed a few years ago. We plant with our newer Kinze planter, rather than the Max-emerge, which sits in the shed. We are going to tear it down to the center 6 rows for a back up planter for filling in patches where crops may have drowned out after planting. Since I am a part time farmer, I need to have everything operational when I am at the farm. Thus far, I have been quite blessed with minimal breakdowns, and I appreciate the fact I have a well kept line of equipment without all the electrical headaches others have with this new equipment. My planter is set up for variable rate seeding and starter fertilizer, but I have not done anything with it yet. I probably will get it going in a year or two, but if I have an electrical "gremlin" hit me, I still can go back to the fixed rate seeding rate and fertilizer so I am not "dead in my tracks."