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Least liked tractor?

L

Lazy WP

Well-known Member
Just curious what everyone?s least favorite tractors are and why? Mine has to be the LA Case. Probably not the tractors fault but Dad was chopping corn with it. Some how he got his leg tangled up in the PTO. I was riding in the wagon and can remember to this day what it looked like. I think that was in September and in November he rolled it on top of himself. They think a blood clot from the PTO incident caused him to blackout. Broke both of his legs in that. Neither were probably the tractors fault but I have never had any use for a LA since.
 
No where near as bad as that, but similar. IHC/Farmall 806. Can?t say it was really the tractors fault, my grandpa got it used and I don?t know any of its prior history, but by the time he had it, it seamed every time he or dad went to use it, something broke. Finally sold it at auction.
 
LA was a great wheatland tractor. But the one flaw it had in my eyes was the PTO being placed so high up under the seat.
 
I bought a 500 Case once that had the fenders and seat beat all up.Story was a hired hand was using the tractor with a brush hog the PTO shaft to the hog broke and the end on the tractor beat the fellow to death tractor was up against a tree still digging when they found it.
 
I never had one or ran one but I've been told the old Fordsons were a bad tractor. Rumor is very hard starting and easy to flip over on you.
 
1070 case. It was the loader/ hay feeding tractor for years. Non power shift model and nearly every time you changed directions the shift lever would slide out of the shifting plates so you had to carry a small pry bar with you. When you killed it for one reason or another you lost all braking ability all of the feed pads are on hills so if it took off you prayed you got it stopped before the woods. One time I used the transmission to try to stop it in an emergency it fired up with the valves backwards so exhaust was coming out of the breather. Overall the tractor was nearly indestructible and fairly cheap to work on but it has been really the only tractor I can say anything bad about to date
 
Neighbor had some sort of Moline that I used to bring home a saw rig.....it had a hand clutch and hand brakes was scary to drive....also had a JD 1010 that was a gutless wonder that I got stuck hauling hm corn gravity boxes with....would not pull them in road gear
 
Anything made by Belarus. We had a 520 then an 825 both fwa with loaders open station. The 825 came cables and a cloth seat and the dash shorted out the first week we had it. Heavy cheap work horses but shake rattle and roll.
 
Really hard to say that there is one I really dislike. Dad had one heck of a lemon years ago that I will not name here because of all the hard feelings it caused. Was not sorry to see it go with side vented crankcase back in the 1970's. Today I am really indifferent about that brand and model. I guess I can say that it was a brand that ultimately folded into AGCO as it does not single any one brand out.
 
In less than an hour's time you could have solved your shifting problem. All you had to do was cut a piece of 3/16" steel the same width and shape of the shift lever and weld or bolt it fast to the lever making it thicker so I couldn't slip between the quadrants. Simple fix for any farmer. As far as brake failure, most all tractor brands with power brakes in that time period had nothing when engine was dead. Why didn't you just pull the hand brake on. It was all mechanical. I have a saying. "One needs to be smarter than the piece of equipment that he is operating". That applies to hammers and knives also.-----Loren
 
Oliver 70, hands down.

It was a nice driving tractor if you could ever get the blasted thing started.
 
The one I disliked was an International 340 utility. I was stuck a lot, both summer and winter. The hydraulic pump was outside the motor. In winter I had to build a fire under it to warm it up. It came with a 3 bottom 2 point hitch plow. Grrrrr.
 
The least favorite case I drive was dad's 730, most gutless case I've ever driven. Was dad's favorite tho. Worst we had that I drove was an old Wheatland type Moline. Was a big old 4 cylinder engine and 5spd trany and you sat low down behind the axle. You could not see if you sat so you has to stand to drive. Had 18.4-30 tires and was so low you were always stuck. Road gear was so fast you couldn't pull wagons because it didn't have enough power. Started and ran fine, just could stand to drive it. Only thing we ever used it for was in the grain dryer, and it burned quite a bit more gas than the DC doing the same thing.
 
For features,or just because I shouldn't have bought it in the first place? I bought an early Farmall 706 diesel one time off a potato farm that the bank "let have an auction". That thing was wore out even worse than I imagined it was. It went to the salvage yard to be a parts donner.
 
As a teenager I was hired by a neighbor to disk some freshly broke land with a Case D, that thing was hanging up on every 3rd or 4th furrow, the drawbar was just too low on those models. Ah but the DC4 was a different story,had a bit more elevation.
 
A Deutz as I was to dumb to figure out what lever did what and there seemed to be lots of levers. Maybe if I could have read German? Tom
 
Well on this one I have found that to replace a simple reverse shift fork one has to remove the pinion shaft which is a also the top gear shaft in the transmission and it has a press fit bearing which has no way to really press it on so you use a punch to tap it on a bit and then tighten the lock nut and then tap again and keep doing that till tight
 
AC WC. Hand brakes. I started driving that hateful orange killer when I was about 10. I had to jump off the seat to pull the brake lever then jump over to the seat to try to get it centered in the next row. The steering wheel would spin so fast I can't believe it never broke my arm. I was pullin a disc once when the front tire fell in a hole and the steering wheel spun and threw me off the tractor. I rolled out of the way of the disc, then had to run to catch it to get back on. My brother started to restore it, I refused to help.
 
1973 I was sixteen years old, so when I wanted to go to town and chase girls any tractor I was on was my least favorite.
 
I bought a 9N Ford. Had a sticky clutch plate and would not come out of gear. Ring gear were missing some teeth. The front mount distributor would get damp and not start. I sold it at a consignment auction and was happy to have it gone.
 
88 series IH, landlord had one here when I moved and used it to move snow with a 3pt blade. Any other IH for me, maybe for field work it would have been ok, but not using a blade and backing up. Was better than shoveling, would have rather had a noisy cab on a 3010-4020.
 
Working on an Allis 190 gas. I've worked on a lot of tractors of all colors, and that thing is just stupidly designed. Maybe it isn't such a pain to work on, but it sure seems like it. Maybe since I'm not really an Allis fan I just grade it harder than an IH or Oliver that are much easier to work on.
 
Hand clutch not bad BUT I have never seen or heard of a Moline with hand breaks. If anybody would know what model it could have been please tell us. I had a U but liked it better than the 2010, 2020 or 3020. Also liked hand clutch on JD A & B
 
(quoted from post at 13:04:36 05/21/19) n fords cause you have to work on them all the time or run them every day.
Click to expand...

Pinball, that right there is a testament to how well designed and built it was in its time. That ANYTHING 70 years old is still thought of as a daily worker by so many owners, while everything else being built at the time has been crushed or relegated to just show or very rare use.
 
International 4166. Their first attempt a large articulating 4 x 4.
It would take a notion to turn without warning. Put me in a canal once. But it drove itself out with me in the floorboard.
It would also turn in a 10' circle.....so you had to watch that disc behind you or goodbye tire.... or flip disc up on cab.
Air conditioner was the first thing to break. IH figured it had A/C so no need to have windows that opened.
 
Well I will stick to what we have owned over the years, and the one tractor we had that I totally hated was a JD 3020 power shift. Could not stand that tractor. It was a gaser burnt more fuel than our big tractor did, that transmission sucked, hated that thing glad when dad traded it off for a 175 AC.
 
C Farmall. It was a very good tractor for cultivating and many other things, but it was just too light and under powered for pulling loaded hay racks, which was the only time I hated to drive it. The lack of gear choices did not help either. Very jumpy clutch for hooking up to wagons, we called it the grasshopper because it was tough to only move an inch with it. When they were available, the Oliver 77, Case 730, JD 4020 and late JD B were all much better choices for pulling wagons.
 
Right now it's a 1955 TO35! Son-in-Law bought it, ran like a top. Then out of nowhere, he couldn't get it to start. Disassembled the fuel system, cleaned the tank and the carb, thing ran like a sewing machine again. First attempt @ bush-hogging this year (just pasture, nothing heavy) engine starts revving!? Rises 400 rpm then falls back. Went through the fuel system again. No changes this time. Oh well, something to work on through these rainy days, I guess?
 
Was that before or after the 4100? My uncle bought a new 4100 one winter but it disappeared before spring and a Case 1200 took its place.
 
I think the 4100 was late 60's. The 4166 was just a 4100 that was turbocharged. 4166 Early 70's.
Ended up getting rid of the 4166 after three years and got a JD 7020.
 
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