2 cylinders and PTO work

dmiller

Member
I have heard from some sources that 2cylinders were known to have problems with PTO work. I was told that the pto didn't necessarily turn smoothly or evenly, but surged a bit due to the 2 cylinders. Was told this was only really a problem on the larger ones (say 50 HP and up).
I have been using a JD 70 as my backup tractor the past few years. Seems like a day or two on it and I find all the loose chains, old shear pins/keys, worn u-joints etc. that my baler and haybine have. They never seem to go bad when used with the larger diesel 6 cylinders.
I was wondering if anyone else had this experience.
 
A lot of 2 cylinders turned a lot of PTO driven equipment for a lot of years with no problems. I do know that on belt driven equipment, under some conditions the belt can start hopping, and you'd better reduce the load real quick or deal with a broken/tangled belt.

Ben
 
Brother in law put gasoline pistons in the old D many years ago so we hooked it to the shop dynamometer. I had to screw the dampner adjustment on the gauge way down to keep needle from pulsing. We were running the exhaust into the squirrel cage shop venting fan and it got a really good cleaning also from those big pops. That poor old dyno was just a hopping.
 
I'm a big defender of the two bangers but do think a lighter duty PTO will have longevity problems with a two banger twisting on it. When we had the 730 gas on the 24T baler we would break one PTO cross a year, maybe 20000 bales. When the 730 left the scene and the 4030 went on this baler we had no more PTO problems. The owner of the baler blamed it on the offset PTO on the 730. I lean toward the two cylinders. Dad said when he pulled the Minneapolis pull type picker with the 51 A he could see the chains jumping but he never had to replace anything on the drive train in the 20 years he used the picker.
 
I think the problem comes when you starting lugging a 2 cylinder down on the PTO, especially with the bigger ones like the diesels. JD did offer a 1,000 rpm PTO option during the last year or so of the 2 cylinders which would have helped smooth things out. I like the big 2 cylinders for drawbar work in wheat farming. But sorry there are better tractors out there for PTO, loader, and haying work.
 
Dad had a new JD 60 on a PTO driven centrifugal water pump back in the '50's. It would consistently break a universal joint in the drive line in a week or less, running maybe 20 hours per day. It was replaced with a 4-cylinder Massey 44 and the u-joint breakage problem went away. As I recall the 60 also took out the bearing on the PTO drive line in the bottom of the tractor's differential case.
 
I suppose that makes sense. It does seem that I find all of the problems in either very heavy fields, or on hilly fields.
 
Pulled a John Deere baler with a 520 JD and a Super H Farmall when a teenager the 520 was better with live PTO but far less problems with baler when using the Super H.
 
We used a JD A on baler and flail chopper and replaced a lot of u joints. If you watched the drive line of the pto you could see it twitch every time engine fired. We latter bought a Farmall M and put it on pto equipment and had no problems with u joints after that.
 
I don't have any facts or reliable opinion, just relaying what I have heard over the years. Some say the uneven pulses are hard on equipment. Others say that if kept up to speed, the heavy flywheel balanced things out.
Just for S&G, they had a display at State Fair back in early 50's. An A was sitting there idling, wheels off the ground, resting on 3 glass Coke bottles, one under each rear axle housing & one under front pedestal. Never cracked the bottles or fell off.
Back in those years, neighbor had a brand new 60. When he pulled sileage chopper we pulled wagons beside him. More convenient when a wagon got full to just pull aside & next empty wagon glide under chute, than to stop to unhook & re-hook next wagon. Anyway, Dad planted his sileage patch in an old hog pasture, grew about 10 ft tall. That 60 earned its keep that day, first gear had plenty power, but chopper was at full capacity. Only repairs he made to chopper the 5 years I worked with that crew was to replace dulled knives.
Willie
 
I used my styled D on the silage blower one year. Broke several shear pins. Never did that before or since with other tractors.
 

Some of this newer equipment doesn't work as well on a 2 cylinder. What J/D built when the tractors
were being built work's fine.. The Key is Keep your PTO @ operating speed. You will have less issue's.
If something was built to run @ 540, then run it @ 540.
 

It depends. The D, A,G, 60 and 70gas run slower at pto rpms than other two cylinders .
The 60 and 70gas made the lights flicker when operating the pto generator. The 40,50,70 diesel, 80 and 435 did not cause flickering lights.
 
Simple physics says that there has to be an impulse, the amount of the impulse will vary between OK and unacceptable.
 
I used to used a 730 diesel to power the fans on a large grain dryer (which was somewhat of a load for it) and it was tough on U-joints, and even broke off a stub shaft.

After that I used a 4030 diesel, with NO driveline issues.
 
We have used two cylinder tractors on pto work for years. The secret is to not lug them down. Keep the pto speed up. If the tractor gets to "hammering", back off. Never any chain, u-joint or any other problems with anything. None. Mike
 
Love those old 2 cylinders or not they do send the Put-Put through the drive line, a guy near me ran one on a generator to power the milk parlor when outage happened, it would make the lights flicker..the 4 cylinders wouldn't...
 
My brother I in-law Q's Dad used to feed a load of cattle every year. Had a real nice setup, 40 foot concrete stave silo, roto-feed bunk, nice big loafing shed, everything was concrete.

When it came time to chop corn silage the neighbor to the north came over with his 560 FARMALL, chopper and silage wagon, Dad took his '51 FARMALL M down to run the blower. Brother in-law's Dad used his WD-45 to pull loads from the field up to the silo. ALL his putt-putts stayed in the shed.

About the only putt-putt I remember doing much PTO work was the R diesel Dad sold to the township road commissioner in 1964. Road commissioner used it to run a heavy-duty 4-5 foot wide rototiller over windrows of scarified road pavement. Dad had the R for about 5 months, late December to early/mid May, never hooked a thing to the PTO. Township had the R three years. EVERY SUMMER they knocked the PTO out of the tractor and it was in the shop for 2-3 weeks having it rebuilt again. Last time it happened the road commissioner traded it for a 770 Oliver diesel that ran the rototiller for 20 years with NO problems.
 
It would stand to reason the bigger the two cylinder, the bigger the impulse. We have used them for PTO stuff for years, but there have been a few issues.

Usually those issues involved our 720. We had a 16a green chopper that lived for years powered by a 70 and a 3020, but when we bought the 720 diesel the gear box gave up after two loads. Perhaps it was time, perhaps it was the 720.

Same 720 used to make the light flicker in the house when used on the generator, too.

We have irrigation equipment, and for several years ran a well head with a B. Not making any pressure, just keeping a pond full so the pump (JD 6068T) could pull from the pond to run the pivot. The B in that situation worked fine, but an irrigation salesman/farmer once told of his family using a 730 on a wellhead... it used very little fuel, but where the pipe was Tee'd, they needed to chain the pipe together, as the impulses from the 730 would cause the water to drive the pipe apart.

Last, I've been told never to use a large frame standard like an 820 on a haylage blower... haylage has a way of wedging, and if the blower plugged, the torque from those big 2 cylinder diesels would rip the PTO clutch loose in a heartbeat.

All that said, running a grain auger or similar with some common sense seems fine. Best of luck.
 
Come to think of it, my two bangers lugged away on an Artsway grinder mixer for many hours with no drive line problems but the Artsway did have the heavy PTO shaft. It took a strong arm to pick up the shaft to hook it to the tractor. I even had the R on it till I found out about the weak PTO on an R.
 
I've been baling for a few years with a 51 A on a 273. My driveline is loose but no problems. We don't run it real hard, though. I was pulling a Woods 60 knocking down mature hay one time and when it lugged down the mower would start jumping off the ground in time with the impulses. Best to keep the RPM up.
 
Yes there are better things to use on a pto implement than a 2 cylinder. I baled hay last year with the '52 G and broke alot of shear bolts. Never had a problem before with the 300 IH. But it was down and the G was free. I went thru almost a half box of shear bolts for 25 acres of hay. But we still love the 2 longers anyway!
 
Bigbore one possible reason you sheared pins was because of the heavy flywheel and rotating mass the G has compared to the Farmall. The G doesn't pull down as quick when a slug goes through. Last year I had an Oliver 88 on a New Holland baler in heavy hay. Low gear was too fast on the Oliver so we switched to a Deere 630 because the 630 has a creeping low gear. What a difference! The Oliver engine pulled down and snapped back up with every plunger stroke. The 630 ran a pretty close to constant speed and we did shear a couple of pins with the 630. The two bangers would be a real good baler tractor if it wasn't for the uneven firing order.
 
Yes Jim the G didn't pull down at all , and I agree with the Oliver governor statement! They sure run nice and smooth but can be touchy at times. I know a kid that pulls a Super 88, that thing sounds like a super stock diesel hunting around until it gets enough load to settle down.
 
(quoted from post at 18:57:14 07/07/15) It would stand to reason the bigger the two cylinder, the bigger the impulse. We have used them for PTO stuff for years, but there have been a few issues.

Usually those issues involved our 720. We had a 16a green chopper that lived for years powered by a 70 and a 3020, but when we bought the 720 diesel the gear box gave up after two loads. Perhaps it was time, perhaps it was the 720.

Same 720 used to make the light flicker in the house when used on the generator, too.

We have irrigation equipment, and for several years ran a well head with a B. Not making any pressure, just keeping a pond full so the pump (JD 6068T) could pull from the pond to run the pivot. The B in that situation worked fine, but an irrigation salesman/farmer once told of his family using a 730 on a wellhead... it used very little fuel, but where the pipe was Tee'd, they needed to chain the pipe together, as the impulses from the 730 would cause the water to drive the pipe apart.

Last, I've been told never to use a large frame standard like an 820 on a haylage blower... haylage has a way of wedging, and if the blower plugged, the torque from those big 2 cylinder diesels would rip the PTO clutch loose in a heartbeat.

All that said, running a grain auger or similar with some common sense seems fine. Best of luck.

I am personally familiar with a turned up 830 that spent over a decade of duty custom corn and haylage foraging on a New Holland whirl a feed silo blower model 40 iirc . Standard policy was to fill the whirl a feed to over flowing for days at a time. No pto clutch failure ever . The 540 pto shaft was a heavy unit. It was the highest rated , a #6 iirc.
 
It wasn't a NH 40... they were all 1000 RPM. I have 2.

NH made a good blower with the whirl a feed design. It was very difficult to plug the blower itself unless the silo got full. The tunnel would plug first, and when that happened the belt would slip. If one
were using one (a 28, 540 RPM) that design would be a lot more forgiving.

Some of the older blower designs from the 60s and 70s though, like Fox, deere, IH, etc weren't so great, and you could plug the pipe if one wasn't running in just the right amount of water with haylage, or put in a big lump, or whatever. Then
the blower would slam to a stop and try to choke off the tractor, unless something else gave like a PTO clutch lining. A friend who owned several 80s through 830s refused to put them on his blower with
haylage... "I've replaced enough clutches."

And if they only blew corn silage, there most likely wouldn't be any issue either, as it is a lot less "sticky".
 

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