Ganging multiple tractor together. Was this really needed?

Hey,

I see these "hitched together monstrositys" every once in awhile on here and at the tractor shows.I even seen company that were dedicated to this process,building some nice looking machines.

But was this something that was a NEEDED thing ???? How efficient were these tractors? (Posting this on IH forum,as well.)

They have been ganging tractors of all types together for a long time. Honestly I don't know much about the farming side of things but on the construction side they used to tie two D9 CAT dozers together for the additional power. I've only seen pictures of both type setups, but when they needed ripping power they would tie two of them together front to back, and when they wanted pushing power there was an oversized blade made and they would tie two of them together side to side.

Beyond that, scrapers, especially the larger ones, have been using the multiple tractor idea for years. In that case the machines weren't actually tied together permanently, and they do one of two things. One is the scraper pulls into the cut, drops the bowl, and is then pushed from the rear by a dozer to load it. If a company only does this on occasion they will usually use a regular dozer blade to do the pushing, but when there is a dedicated dozer they do make a cushion blade specifically designed for the job. The other way, and it's more prevelant with the larger scrapers, is that each machine has a hitch pin on the rear and a hook on the front. When they go into the cut they will hook up to each other. This basically gives each machine twice the power it would normally have to load. In larger operations I have seen pics of three or more machines all hitched together. More power equals faster load times, equals more dirt moved in a given amount of time.

In the end I guess you could say the main purpose of doing something like this is time and money. More power means the job gets done faster and the owner makes more money.......

Well-------- two three bottom tractors could pull a six bottom plow or you could plow 40 acres in the time it took to plow 20 acres with one tractor. or you could get rid of one hired man( if you could find a hired man after 1941) it was the early version of the giant 4 wheel drives of today. some are/ were monstrosities some were pretty well engineered .Paul

'Back in the day' when 50hp was a big tractor,farmers simply needed more power.before 4wd,money was tight,tandem tractors(a clever farmer could make his own) was the way to go.yes they were more efficient and could pull more width and use less fuel than 2 singles.There are several youtube videos on the subject.

"But was this something that was a NEEDED thing ???? "

What do YOU think?


If you had a farm on the plains measured in square miles/sections rather than acres, 40's, 80's, or quarters, and had to "get 'er done" and the typical BIG tractor of the era was 80 or 90 HP do you not suppose doubling your HP and cutting the labor/manpower needed in HALF was a good thing?

WHY do you suppose they now make and sell 500+ HP tractors costing $300,000 or more?

Picture yourself being the main person trying to keep a farm going back in those days...

With not near as much work to do in the winters leaving more time to tinker in the barn, it would be pretty tempting to try and figure out some ways to make the field work go faster.

I know I always enjoyed driving the tractor unless I had a bunch of other stuff that needed doing - and then the acres would go by agonizingly slow... And I had a big Versatile with 45-50 implements...


Howard

Hi Wayne, along those lines I have seen pics of 4 D8s tied into a 2x2 quad for pushing coal at a power plant. Have also seen 2 D8/D9s, one on either end of about a 60 ft. blade for terracing reclaimed strip mines. Some LeT built scrapers used 3 bowls and 3 engines coupled together semi-permanently. Like most of us, you do the best with what you have.

I am getting some GREAT answers on here!!! (Just never have been in these situations,so I am a little ignorant towards this subject)


Keep the replies coming !

a guy near here had to 44 masseys tied together and pulled 6-16's with it, twice the work with one operator, later he had a 180/1080mf then two 1080's and finally a 1470 Case replaced them.

Imagine yourself in the northeast, in October, in a corn field a foot deep in mud. No one invented- or say- produced 4wd tractors yet, or as the guys said, no hp much over 50, and you would only need that much for this one job a year, and they were big bucks then too.... so you invent something like a military vehicle that you make from whatever is hanging around, now you have 4wd, and power to turn it, power a corn chopper running full bore and full wagon sliding behind, now it can atleast happen. Option was to harness up the team and see how long before they get the binder stuck.... the bad ol days....

were they needed?yes definitly.how many 4 wd tractors are you seeing nowdays?i wouldnt even consider buying a NEW tractor without front wheel assist anymore to farm with.you have to remember that back when these were being built,a 40-50 horse tractor was considered a pretty big one. to put it in perspective ,this last weekend i plowed @ 7 acres.started at sundown when it was cooling off,and ran (constant)until 3am or so,this would be conservativly 6 hrs constant running with a 8n in 3rd gear 3/4 throttle.i finished the next morning in a couple of hours after refueling.so all in all right at 8 hrs for that food plot in plowing alone.still have to disc,maybe harrow and plant.figure it this way,i was covering you can say 2ft a pass with my two bottom plow he on the other hand was pulling a 20 ft chisel,which makes each pass he makes 10 times more productive at least.he was burning maybe 5 gal fuel an hr as compared to my 1 but he could do everything in right at 45 minutes.i still have another 8 hrs or so.he burnt 3.5 gallons,i will burn right at 16 so he is close to five times as effecient on fuel.so heres the total stats,he is 10 times more effecient with his work,hes over 5 times more fuel effecient,and hes over 8 times as effecient on time!were they needed?pencil it out yourself.

dang,going senile.forgot to add here that a neighbor did this exact spot and had it tilled and planted in 45 minutes.

The thing thats a little surprising is that the machinery companies didn't pick up on it sooner and start building big honkin' 4WD tractors to sell much sooner than they did.

Probably came down to money- farmers wouldn't pay the price of a new, big tractor, but could hook two old ones together for very little. The goal was to work the ground they had, faster. The "dog chasing its tail" syndrome of buying bigger machinery to work more ground, then getting more ground necessitating even bigger machinery, all on borrowed money, didn't really amp up until the 70's.

I have seen clips on You-tube with Baker steam engines "double heading" on belt work, the rail road people double headrd locomotives and still do. Some of the more primitive double rigs I have seen were set up to gang them together for tillage and seperate them for lighter work claimed more flexability than one big tractor. Sometimes I think it was just a challenge to make something that worked better/faster/cheaper- a trait that tends to keep one farming

when you consider things such as this,look at it this way,hp is not really a measure of power,its a measure of speed.more hp = more speed.the one constant in farming anywhere is time.everything else can change.so for any given amount of work more hp means you save time.its not that 50-60-70 years ago we didnt want to farm more,its simply that we didnt have the time to farm more.if you could double your hp,and most of these things not only doubled hp but because of the way the were set up even gave you more usable hp from each tractor,you could do more,in any given amount of time.this means that for the first time farms had the potential to grow very large simply because you had the time to farm them.just as the early tractors that replaced the horse more than doubled or tripled your potential out put these also redoubled your output.no where you can think of with the possible exception of the race track is differences in hp more readily apparent than on the farm.

Not a double monstrosity,but the same idea. My uncle chopped corn in the late 50s and sixties with his Ford 800 45HP. hour after hour day after day week after week. The corn was all dried up by the time he got done, and the engine needed rebuilding every five years. Around 1970 while my uncle was on vacation in FL my cousin bought a Ford 5000 at auction. Uncle came home and was very angry at the waste of money, but, come next fall, they were chopping in third gear, got done in 2/3 the time, better quality feed, less grain needed, better quality milk. Made more $ in less time.

Here in the great plains wheat farms it was a question of 4 wheel drive as much as twice the HP. Any body that tried it never went back..then came the big 4 wheeler.

We had a similar hp Ford 961 and didn't consider trying to run a chopper. Hauling around the filled wagons on a few hills was tough enough. Might have been more practical if just blowing the chopped corn into a wagon towed by another tractor. In my opinion the Ford 5000 ranks as one of the best tractors of all time.

My dad ganged two John Deere model Ds together to greatly increase labor efficiency. While true that labor was quite cheap back in those days the money to pay hired help was hard to come by for a young family.

I don't know how long he used the two together, but eventually went to a single Minneapolis Moline GTB. Then added a John Deere D as a second tractor and eventually replaced it with an LA Case. Next came a MM G705, etc.

My dad and a nieghbor built hitches to tandem 2 m;s together, front tractor hydralics ran the clutch and throttle of the second tractor had to beef up the drawbar on the front tractor. Pulled 6--14"s in 3rd gear, some places in 4th.
sure covered some ground this was mid 50's to early 60's

Never seen the 4 8's tied together, I'll have to do some surfing and find some pics on that. Have you seen the worlds largest dozer? I can't remember the site I saw it on but it was built back in the 70's and had two CAT engines driving it. The size of the thing, based on the man in the pics I saw being say 6 feet tall, looked like it put an older D9 to shame. From what I understand there was also a huge grader built at the same time for the same company but neither machine really got sold or used because of a trade embargo enacted right after they were completed saying the couldn't be sold to the intended (Arab I believe)customer at the time.

(quoted from post at 08:12:55 09/09/11) The thing thats a little surprising is that the machinery companies didn't pick up on it sooner and start building big honkin' 4WD tractors to sell much sooner than they did.

Probably came down to money- farmers wouldn't pay the price of a new, big tractor, but could hook two old ones together for very little. The goal was to work the ground they had, faster. The "dog chasing its tail" syndrome of buying bigger machinery to work more ground, then getting more ground necessitating even bigger machinery, all on borrowed money, didn't really amp up until the 70's.

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The first of the tandums were very few and far between. The first 4x4s were marketed around 1960 but most farmers thought it cheaper at the time to hire help and have a 2nd or 3rd tractor than to just buy a single large tractor. I was told by a local farmer in 1972 that anyone buying more than 100HP was showing off. He was running an 826 and 3 560's with himslef, his son (BIL now) and 2 hired guys. Government forced pay increases in the mid to late 70's changed all that as farm lobr got much more expensive. That's when you really started seeing a lot of 4X4s.

Rick