ih planting equipment ?

what differant ih planting equipment have you had over the years?
my dad,uncle and grandpa, on my dads side all had 2 row mccormick deering corn planters
years ago, in fact, i still have my dads,
and my grandpa, had a steel wheel grain drill,

what have you had or used over the years?
thanks

I have an anchient 12x7 horsedrawn grain drill.It was converted to 3 point years ago.I havent used it for years. Should haul it off for scrap.I use #185 unit planters to plant beans. 4 units mounted 30" apart on a diamond toolbar.

You have a pic of the 185 ih planters i have seen one in 10 years

Grandfather had a 2 row McD and we still have a few plates for it. I owned a 400 cyclo 6 row and 5100 drill DD w/ gauge wheels. The 400 was not bad but was flawed. Had to have a field clean of rocks so the tubes did not sway which is hard to do in the East. Also, the seed trench closing system did not work well in the heavy soils. I looked at an 800 to replace the 400. While a good planter it still had the same issues as a 400 for me. Obviously, no planter likes rocks but it is not possible to pick a field clean here. A JD 7000 will handle a field with baseball sized rocks where they will give an IH fits. So the 400 got replaced with a JD 7000. The 5100 grain drill I thought the lift bars were not especially stout and would bend over time due to the heavy soil. It ultimately got replaced by a JD 450.

I can get some later.

I agree, the 400 planter was junk,did a poor job of seed placement,a high upkeep planter, that why they called them early riser planters, you had to get up early to fix it for the day, it was definately oversold, a IHC 58 planter did a better job, with a lot less expense! They claimed that any size seed would fit the whole in the drum, that was nothing but a bald faced lie, IHC was losing money when they came with it, didn't take time to perfect it!! Nobody in my area kept a 400 or 500 planter over 3-4 years,traded them for Deere or Whites !!

In good field conditions (loamy soil and very few rocks) the 400 did pretty good with seed placement. My seed people always seemed to do a good job with seed size as I owned just one corn drum and never had an issue that way. All in all the JD did better with less things to watch out for.

Am I seeing wrong? You have a 4x4 planter?? Is that set to plant double rows?

Mike

During the late 70's and needing money, my brother and I built soybean planters from IH 6 row wide with IH 56 units with disk openers. We had 4 rows at 15 inches, a 30" space for the tires and 3 rows at 20", another 30" space for tires and 4 more rows at 15 inches each. You could cultivate with a custom made 11 row cultivator that we built and combine with the tires in the skip row. It took 2 planters to build one and we rebuilt the drives and units. The dealer in Perry gave us a discount on parts until we had purchased 4 planters and figured out what we were doing. But he should have been happy getting rid of those old planters. We had IH 400 Air planters we used on corn. And traded them after 3 or 4 seasons or gave them away to get Deere 7000's. We sold one planter/cultivator and used the other for several seasons adding another cultivator until we bought skip row planters. Yield on the narrow rows was 10 to 20 bushels better than with the 400 Air planters. And our test strips were 4 wide, 11 narrow, 4 wide and 11 narrow. CIH has made adjustments to their planters since which they all have.

yes you are right. Made to plant two rows of soybeans 5 inches apart on one 30"bed.

My earliest recollection is a 3pt 2 row JD on a Case VAC
When I was little. Then I think we had a 56 row until pop got one of the first 400s. Had that until we wanted to move away from moldboard plowing everything. No till was coming of age and we had a AC 333 for awhile Seed placement sucked with that and we traded that for a 900 all the corn planters were 4 row. At the height I was covering about 320 acres a year with the 900. I loved that planter. If one paid attention I could make that thing plant a picket fence that would rival any of those Hi Tech things of today
We also had a 13 hole #10 grain drill from my earlier CNN memory. Im 65 now but we used that drill up until about 10 years ago when we upgraded to 5100 soybean special.

That's a neat setup. I'll have to remember that.

Mike

Listers are all we used down here in south Texas.
Don't know why they are called listers. Dad always called them middlebusters.

Dad would get his 490 Deere planter out and start wrenching on it as I plowed the last 20 acres of corn ground that year. The runner type openers were absolutely terrible at maintaining planting depth. The clutch was something that needed work every spring. I guess it was "Normal" for the planter to drop both row markers every time. Planter was used 20 years and probably planted less than 3000 acres. The first 8-9 years Dad check-row planted with it. Then hill dropped till he quit farming. The last two years he farmed were the only years he planted beans, I don't remember him drilling them, think he hill dropped them too. I was working off the farm those summers, didn't do ANY cultivating.

Runners were poor in comparison to disc openers regardless of planter. All the runner type units were parked or traded by the mid-1960's around here. The neighbor had an AC which I thought was better than anything IH or JD had to offer at the same time.

Listers created furrows of dirt that you used to cover weeds in the corn rows. By the third cultivating, there were ridges in the stalk rows. That's how many M's with pickers got bent axles. Planters left the surface nearly level.
In Nebraska in the 50's and 60's most people used listers.
As chemical weed control became more common, more farmers used listers.

I follow that.
Down here the March winds will blow away flat lands before the plants get out of the ground.

Dad's 490 was new spring of '52, neighbor we traded help with had a 494 he bought new when he got home from Korea, I can't remember if it had the insecticide & herbacide hoppers, Dad did put a pair of GANDY hoppers on the 490, but other than the sturdier frame on the 494, not much difference between the two planters. Another problem with those vintage planters, near empty seed boxes caused shallow planting, full planter boxes buried the seed. Dad's 490 was the first 4 row in the neighbothood. In fact, the last 20 acres of corn I worked up ahead of the planter had been fall plowed, It was bone dry when I disked it, it wound up like a sand box, Dad stopped and adjusted planting depth 4 times before he had gone 10 rods! It was burying seed 4 inches deep at first. The BTO I worked part time for planted a couple hundred acres of beans every year with a 690 planter, 6-30's.Home-made from two 490's.
I remember seeing an AC planter on the cover of Successful Farming magazine, think it was a field test of their no-till planter.
We farmed too close to the Quad-Cities, both Deere & IH built their planters there. Deere at Plow-Planter, now Seeding Systems, 300 3rd Ave, Moline. IH East Moline built planters when they were "in season" in fact, my next door neighbor was the General Foreman of the planter assembly dept at the East Moline plant. Think his people built corn heads in the off planter season.
The last time I stopped by the FARMALL PLANT, the part of the plant were lots of gray iron machining was done had been torn down. And the area was being used for parking green/yellow planters prior to shipment. I think the Christenson Brothers who ran L.R.ChristensonL Industrial Supply still owned the majority of the plant property.

The 50 forage harvester down in the shed was made at East Moline. I'm thinking that the 40 blower we had was made there, also.