|
This is a long post. I hope you find the real life story interesting. Some of the other posts mentioned the irregularity of the power to the drive train. The Deere -vs- the M when belted to hte thresing machine. A very true problem! I'd like to relate the following as a real example of how much of a problem this was. My brother worked for a guy who's Dad ran a Ford tractor dealership. Dad would bring hard to diagnose tractors to the farm & let the boys run 'em 'till they quit. He'd then haul them back to the shop & fix them. Trouble was, they never came back! Once fixed, he'd put them on the lot for sale. To combat this (and partly just to spite the old man) the oldest son bought a late model JD 820. The old 820 consistently amazed them with its brute force and what a work horse it was. Now to the problem they had.... These guys had a chopper that they ran with a 5000. The 5000 had had been traded in 'cause the previous owner didn't like the sound of the turbo. One afternoon the turbo started to make more noise & shortly thereafter announced it's resignation! Lots of smoke, knocking sounds and nasty noises! Hmmmmm. What now. The only other tractors on the farm were an old Fordson Dexta you needed dynamite to start (worn out), a Major without a PTO, a Farmall M and the 820. The 820 won the election. It did an amazing job of gobbling corn! One gear seemed a bit slow & the next seemed a bit high but these guys were sort of cowboys so you know where they ran it! The old 820 just barked louder & the corn really flew. Two days later they shut down for the PM milking. After milking some gear lube appeared to be leaking out of the chopper's main gear case. Checked the level. OK. Start chopping! The gear case self destructed shortly after. It was a right angle affair & the main case proper simply broke in half. Geeze. Must have been a bad casting & just finally broke after all these years. The IH dealer in town had an old parts chopper just like this one out back of their shop. Maybe they'd let go of the main gear case too! Sure enough they agreed & we went to work. We were able to start chopping after the PM milking the next day. The old 820 roared to life & chopped for three more days before some gear lube started leaking out of the gear case. Uh oh! It only lasted a few more hours. Same split to the main gear case! Back to the IH dealer we went. Knowing these guys' Dad ran the Ford dealer the IH man asked "what the $%&*@#%$ are you running that chopper with? An old JD 820 was the reply. Good Lord! No wonder! That old 820 has so much torque and hammering behind that PUTT PUTT PUTT it's just like a huge and very powerful impact wrench! Fox didn't build the chopper to be run with that much hammering. Deere built theirs to withstand the hammering of their own drive trains but not everybody put the beef into their machines to withstand such punishment. This was our real life example of how big Deere tractors were simply becomming lethal to some other brands of tractor driven equipment. Deere engineers knew that in the 50's. They also knew still more power from even bigger 2 cylinder tractors would just have made matters worse! This matter "hammered home" the need for a New Generation of power. I'm sorry. Bad pun there but I couldn't help myself.
| 
