Did I read this right? 27 horsepower??

A 350 Chevy that is running good will put out 350 ft-lbs of torque and around 200 horsepower or more. A Farmall M (248 cubes) will put out around 35 horsepower and a little over 300 ft-lbs of torque.

Horsepower comes with higher RPM (the rate the work is done). Torque still gets the job done, and I know people will argue that you need horsepower as well, but look at an 18-wheeler with 400 horsepower pulling 80,000 pounds down the road... BIG torque numbers from that slow-running diesel. Put a 400 horsepower Corvette engine in the big rig and it probably won't even move - not enough low-end torque.

Rambling over, feel free to argue, but I'll stand by wanting a high-torque diesel to do the big time work.

Can you figure out how to get 300 horses hooked up to get your Corvette to go from zero to 60 mph in five seconds?

Where does the manure go and not affect traction or the load?

Original H had under 20 horse at the drawbar; about 17 if memory serves. However, if the step up pistons are installed, they then will have about 27 horse.

Allan

But the tractors are geared to where that's all the rpm's it takes to do what they were designed to do.

27 horsepower might not sound like alot now, but back when tractors first came out, they were intended to replace real live oat-burning horses, where 2, 3, and 4 horse teams were common. The "horsepower" rating of a tractor isn't truly equal to the number of acutal real horses it would replace, it's really more a "rule of thumb" measurement of the amount of work an engine can do over a set amount of time. If you hitched 27 big stout horses to the drawbar of an H to see which would outpull the other, they'd drag it around like it was a cardboard toy. Lots of guys around here used to feed 6 ton haystacks on rolling sleds pulled by 6-horse teams, but it usually took at bare minimum a 45-50hp tractor to pull the same load once people made the switch to tractor power.

Sorry for kinda going off on a tangent there, but I like to talk about that kinda stuff!

Back when horsepower was invented as a standard, the horses were being used to run pumps to drain mines. This is a steady load and apparently 550 ft-lb/min was about all the average horse could keep up FULL TIME. Any horse or man can put out much more energy over a short period of time than they can full time. Pulling a heavy sled included. If they are expected to pull the sled 30 miles every day (3 miles per hour) the size sled would go way down. Plowing requires some rest and the plow is out of the ground at the end of the furrow. So I would imagine a two-horse plow setup, if you are plowing 1,600 acres (ten quarters) would take several teams to keep up with a lowly H.

A horse on a treadmill or pulling a load in a circle can work pretty steady but they still need to rest periodically. A little one-horse engine, running at full load, never has to rest, so the total amount of work done is pretty impressive over long periods of time.

The "not lose weight" phrase from my dad indicates the horse is not over-exerting.

I have no doubt that if you keep an H at full load on a hammermill or elevator 26 horses could not keep up over a period of several months and maintain their body condition.

These low-RPM engines have massive torque, and the tractors don't move all that fast. That's how they can pull so much with only 27HP.