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Deas Plant.
03-01-2003 16:07:36
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Re: Traction Booster in reply to D17, 02-28-2003 16:14:54
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Hi, D17. There is a school of thought DownUnder in Australia that, up to a certain point -- around 250 hp, really wide single tyres are better than duals. The pluses seem to be that you can fill them with water or whatever other ballast you might favour where filling outer duals can be a recipe for disaster, you don't have the breakages sometimes associated with duals, you don't have a gap to fill with mud and/or debris and the tractor turns easier because it doesn't have the drag between the individual tyres of each dual wheel. One Australian manufacturer built 2w.d. tractors up to 350 hp on wide singles that consistently outpulled 4 w.d. tractors of similar hp. (See link below.)
Also, when using a one-way disc plow as I understand they are called in the U.S., 'setting' the plow correctly can do a bit to reduce the load too. Using a SWINGING drawbar, set the plow so that it does not cause the tractor to pull one way or the other but pulls in a straight line. This is done by altering the pulling position of the plow's drawbar on the draught bar and adjusting the steering link to suit.
One tandem one-way disc plow arrangement that found a lot of favour in Australia was to fit a drawbar to the rear of the front plow and simply couple the rear plow to that drawbar. Plows connected in tandem this way seemed to pull lighter than plows connected to a tandem draught beam. It was sometimes necessary to lengthen the draught bar on the front plow to get the centre of pull far enough over to balance the weight of the rear plow. The couple of times I set plows up like this, I also found it helped to have a 'rack' of about a dozen holes in the drawbar fitted to the rear of the front plow to allow for a bit of fine-tuning there too.
One of these set-ups that I made using 2 14 disc plows, I was pulling behind an old 2T series Cat. D4 of 36 hp. In one field, there was a creek about 30 yards wide with between 6" and a foot of washed sand in the bed. With no power lift on the plows, come to that creek with the D4, simply change down ONE gear and keep going. This farmer also had an 80hp Ford diesel conversion in an Australian-built Chamberlain 40K that had also been fitted with duals. In spite of the extra 44 hp, when I came to the same creek while pulling that tandem plow set-up with the Ford conversion, I had to get off and lift both plows out of the ground, get the tractor onto firm ground on the other side of the creek and lower both plows back in again. I liked that little old D4.
The Chamberlain tractor mentioned above originally had a 40 hp, 2 cyl., horizontally opposed, gas/kero engine that had NO water pump but was cooled by thermo-syphon water circulation. I drove a few and NEVER had one overheat on me. This same design was also modified into a 55 hp diesl engine in later models.Happy plowing. You have a wonderful day. Best wishes. Deas Plant.
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