I was always taught with a diesel you run it at a slow speed until it warms up, run it slow when it's idling (it uses practically no fuel at idle), but otherwise keep that engine wound up to 2800RPM, it has plenty of torque and you won't lug it or bend a crank or anything like that. And those tractor transmissions act like an ratcheting impact wrench on the final drives at too slow a speed, so run it fast to prevent damaging the bull gears.Well, today I was in the field with a 4-150 pulling a tandem disk just deep enough to break up the topsoil and cut stalks (not more than 4 inches.) I was told to run it in 3rd wide open, but I got to thinking that 4th at about half throttle was plenty fast. It took virtually no power to pull that disk this way, and that big Cat 3208 engine was a lot quieter, so I could actually hear the radio for a change. Does that sound reasonable, or was I abusing my equipment? While I'm thinking about it, is there any hard and fast rule about what implements you're supposed to lift out of the ground to turn and which ones you can just drag around? I was taught to lift a disc, but the soil was loose enough on top today it didn't seem to hurt when I wasn't overly quick on the lift lever.
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