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Please do a silly comparison for me

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MattCatlin

Member
I have a dumb request, I"d like your thoughts on comparing mileage on a "generic" gas vehicle (car or pickup) to hours accumulated on a diesl tractor. Like is a 4,000 hour tractor about equal to a vehicle with 150,000 miles on it in terms of useful life left or is a 10,000 hour tractor like a gas vehicle with 250,000 miles on it? Trying to get a rough handle on comparing the difference in hours on various tractors for sale. Would you pay significantly more money say for a MF 165 with a 1,000 less hours on it?
 
40 MPH is the standard that is usually used.

Divide hours by 40.

10,000 engine-hours is roughly equal to 250,000 miles.

Obviously, even miles on a car or truck don't have consistent meaning. A car with 75K back-road miles can have more wear than when driven 250K highway miles.
 
You still have to consider history of a vehicle (if you know it) 100,000 miles of highway driving isn't the same as 100,000 miles of inner city driving. Same applies to tractors. I've seen tractors with 10,000 hours of pulling a planter, raking hay, and clipping pastures that are in far better shape than one that spent 2500 hours in front of a chisel plow.
 
compared to a new vehicle with overdrive, use 60 miles per engine hour as the hours are not clock hours but revolution hours. ie when the engine slows down, the hour meter slows down.. so we figure 60 miles per tach hour. but remember.. you have an industrial engine, that will never run high revs, so the wear will be at least 1/2 as much, over an engine that revs up over 4000 rpms.

No timing chains to streech out, lower cyl wear, and usually more oil quanity so oil wear particles are less, no gunning or washing down the walls with excess fuel, no egr or pvc valve on the older tractors. so your looking a 500,000 mile to 1,000,000 mile engines, very very similar to the over the road trucking engines. So 10,000 hours is normal on lots of tractors.

Most damage done is.. lack of correct antifreeze and coolant treatments, incorrect oil type or wornout, dirty oil, over heated, or run lean or due to stopped up/flooding carbs on the gas models..
 
It depends, if a regular guy (like me) that owns a compact diesel tractor has 1000 hours on a tractor that is good.......But a rental outfit with 1000 hours on a tractor would be (could be) a wreck. I rented a Kubota a few years back and it was junk, it did run though.

Bottom line were they hard destructive hours or easy hours.
 
Would you pay significantly more money say for a MF 165 with a 1,000 less hours on it?

Don"t consider just the engine wear but the drive train as well.

Consider too that a 165 may have a lot of low hours on it from utility uses rather than field uses. Setting and idling while installing fencing might put a lot of actual engine hours on it even if not indicated by the tach and hour meter.
 
There is no perfect math-equasion.

10-30 year old farm tractors rarely get scrapped when something fails -so we usually have a better idea how long the engines last.

Many cars and trucks DO get scrapped when an expensive fix is involved and many go to the junkyard with good engines.

Farm tractors tend have engines that last 10,000 engine hours between tear-downs. It's been that way for 40 years and little has changed.

Cars and trucks often have engines that last 200,000 miles if they don't get scrapped for other reasons. That's with light-use.

And of course, there are anomalies with all.

Dividing tractor hours by 40-50 is the most common conversion factor.
 
Like I said- there is no pefect equasion. So, no, I'm not sure with any of it. 40 has been the average rule-of-thumb used by many people for many years.

No matter what, we are comparing apples to oranges. Farm tractors are HD engines made to work hard. Some do and some do not. Those that I had good knowlege of over the years, that worked hard much of the time, and were well maintained usually lasted around 10,000 hours before a tear-down was needed.

With cars and trucks? I got 520,000 miles out of the 6.2 diesel in my 87 Suburban - but many 6.2s died before 100K. So how to your figure?

If I say my 520,000 mile Chev 6.2 is equal to 10,000 engine-hours in a John Deere 4020 - then we've got a "50" number to convert with.

If I say it's a 100,000 mile Chevy engine that should count, then we have a "10" number to work with.

The only good common measure that I know of - is a measurement of how much fuel an engine has used in its life. Cummins and Cat use that standard sometimes. Amount of fuel takes into account how hard an engine is worked,, how fast it turned, etc. Probably a better measure then hours or miles.
 
Good point. a heavy truck,(semi tractor) often runs a 1000,000 miles +, but the conditions are so different than a farm tractor, that you really cant compare them.
If a farm tractor saw the fewer cold starts, steady partial load, clean running conditions of a big OTR truck, then they might run the equivelent hours / miles.
 
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