(quoted from post at 19:20:39 02/22/21) Hello.
I am curious, I have 2 international super MTAs that were my great grandpas. I just want some general information on some of the practices of that era.
Planting ( pull type or mounted)
Haying (bails or lose hay)
What was more common then the combine or the threshing Machine.
I am just wondering what it would have been like when the M was the biggest on the market. I have done some plowing with it and have enjoyed it. I might do some food plots with it this year.
Just looking for information
Thanks
Charlie
Most people with M's around here had made the switch to baled hay. The first hay balers were available in both square and round...not the big round bales like you see now... little round bales about the size of a small square.
The Allis Chalmers "Roto-baler" would be contemporary with the M-TA. They made little tootsie roll bales about three feet long and maybe a foot in diameter... give or take.
Early models of New Holland and John Deere balers would also have been contemporary.
The M-TA came out before mower-conditioners, or "haybines"; so people like my father would use a sickle bar mower and a "crusher"... so it would take two passes to cut and condition the hay
The M-TA also had International/Farmall's "Fast Hitch". I remember my father having a set of three bottom plows with the male fast hitch adapter, designed to go into the female end on old Farmall tractors.
I was the youngest, so by the time that I came around in 1969, dad was in the process of upgrading to a 460 and 706 Farmall, also both with Fast Hitches. With the bigger tractors, dad sold the three bottom plows and got a set of four bottom plows with the fast hitch, for the 706. (and then an 856 about seven years later).
At the time of the changeover, the M-TA was pulling the crusher and baling with a New Holland 273. The mowing was done with a self propelled windrower (I was too young to remember the make/model... I DO remember its demise, though... it was parked by the road, and some enterprising gentlemen removed its engine in the dark of night.. It had a standard automobile engine just sort of crudely mounted in the chassis... an easy mark.
At that point, dad got a New Holland 469 haybine, which the M would pull sometimes... sometimes the 460 and sometimes the 706.
But... overall... the one thing that I remember being a hallmark of the days of the Super M-TA, and the Farmall 460 for that matter... is the breakneck rides down slopes, if you had engaged the TA going up hill and forgot to disengage going back down. Those one-way clutches in the TA were... um... fun and interesting...