Re: seeking history of 3 point hitch/PTO type/incompatibilit

Posted by neodoodlebug on September 13, 2014 at 15:18:01 from (174.20.213.8):

In Reply to: seeking history of 3 point hitch/PTO type/incompatibilities? posted by 2underage on September 13, 2014 at 10:41:08:

Wow, huge volume of posts for so quick! But i'll just respond to THIS ONE at the moment because it perhaps will help focus why i'm asking these questions. :)

2underage said: (quoted from post at 10:41:08 09/13/14) Neodoodlebug, read your post and I thought I would offer my 2 cents worth. I believe you want to learn about farm tractors and equipment from books and the like. However I must advise you that there is little likelihood of you having much success with this approach.[/quote:740a50aed3] Well the specific information i'm seeking is not 4 years of study but something I should be able to learn in an afternoon buying coffee for someone and talking to them. :) I just don't have anyone where I am (in a million plus metropolis) to ask... But if I explain a little better what i'm doing maybe it will make more sense. Years ago I was originally involved as a contributor to the LifeTrac project. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac Which in ultrabrief was a homebuilt/DIY tractor design (which ended up looking far more like a skid steer) intended to be inexpensive to build and inexpensive to maintain (no single part costing over $250 to replace outside the engine due to hydraulic drive with no transmission to break for instance) for use in any impoverished region believing the main manufacturers were overcomplicating or overcharging for something that should work simpler. However the project sort of took... it's own turn due to internal conflicts not really worth getting into. In the same way that an open source software project 'forks' when there's a disagreement with both groups going their own way, I went my own way. Now the point of a tractor is not to have a tractor but rather the implements you will drive with it. One of the things I strongly suggested (but was ignored over) was that the LifeTrac have the option to be compatible with EXISTING implements, since if someone already has some farm implements they could then use it, or if they found used implements for sale they could buy it based on price alone not worried about "will this work with my X tractor?" because for some things buying used is cheaper than building from scratch. (and obviously alot less work) Because my area of experimentation is more shadetree mechanical engineering related than farming, I don't know things like what each different hitch looks like. But i'm pretty sure I could figure out how feasible it would be to build a form of reconfigurable hitch system. If it's little differences like "A 28 spline shaft instead of a 32 spline shaftr" that's different than something more major like the PTO being 12 inches away and spinning the opposite way. And the earlier I sketch in "something to work with everything" (of a given weight class) the easier it will be. Now whether I PERSONALLY will end up buying an old 1930's thru 1960's farm tractor, build a LifeTrac, or work on engineering up my own modified design is not yet decided. My own "homesteading" project is the reason I want to buy/ build/ modify a tractor but not the reason i'm asking the question or trying to understand tractor design. Because even if I just buy some old Ford and want to use Minneapolis Moline implements with it that I found for cheap at an auction someone ELSE may want a completely different combination and i'm trying to come up with as close to a universal solution "everything hooks to everything" as possible. Instead of buying Tractor A and wondering if I can use implements of Tractor B, i'm seeking a more general understanding for a project that could end up being used by people in africa, south america, or rural asia who may have totally different needs than me. Whether that solution is a modification to the LifeTrac, open sourced as a set of adapters for other old tractor owners to DIY, or part of a clean sheet tractor design of my own. (my original inspiration obviously being the great depression era doodlebugs people were making) So even if I went to the country and five years later was back in the city is irrelevant - whatever I learn in my own explorations will be shared back hoping it will be useful to someone else. In the same way someone writing linux software might try and put in code hooks so that it's easy for others to understand and modify their source code for their own needs, i'm trying to engineer up a solution that can easily adapt "Tractor Q to Implement M" if that's what they want to do even if I never plan to do that myself. [quote:740a50aed3="2underage"] Next, you used the term, "homestead", which is one I have seen in some magazines that appeal to those with farmer hearts who dream of moving to the country and living off the land.

I'm aware of the problems and the failure rate. But i'd rather let me worry about the feasibility and mostly talk about the tractor end on here. :) Also since it's not "just for me" I was hoping it would be irrelevant. All I need right now are rules of thumb for 'back of the diner napkin' level of engineering, nothing i'd be entering into a CAD program until I learn more about the topic. I'm not seeking engineering drawings at this point (just leads for eventual ones which are likely in some of those books already suggested), more like just the rules of thumb. An example of the kind of info i'm seeking would be:

"There's not seven types of hitch but nine! This is a pic of a ford light hitch, this is a ford heavy hitch over 80hp, the ford light is compatible with massey ferguson implements with an adapter but not the other way around... the ford heavy is very difficult to modify but can work it's just not usually worth it. This is an allis chambers hitch, there are adapters to use ford and farmall implements but nothing else. This is an international harvester hitch, nothing else works with it of the 30's to 50's but it can easily use modern implements 1980's and up."



I'm sure 100% of every statement of the above is wrong but if the answer is similar to that it gets me in the ballpark to explore this further. A few sentences explaining critical differences of each type (similar to the person who showed the type 0/1/2/3 hitch, but for the early proprietary hitches, with the "bullet points" of critical information I should know like roughly whats different and why), maybe rough years it was used vs some company merging or splitting up if that happened going their own ways, 85% of what I need to know right now should be containable in a single paragraph per hitch and a picture ideally. The bulk of my understanding so far was summarized already "from 30's to 60's there's a bunch of incompatible hitch designs, then later by 80's it's all compatible". I want to map out and understand the 'family trees' of those hitches.

And i'm not trying to make everyone else do my work for me, just get me a little closer to that ballpark so that it's more filling in generalities than specific information which books on just one system should have since getting all the recommended books and such could take me a few months of interlibrary loans and such in the meanwhile.

This post was edited by neodoodlebug at 15:29:03 09/13/14 2 times.

Replies:

• Re: seeking history of 3 point hitch/PTO type/incompatibilit 6t6cuda 01:23:49 09/14/14 (0)

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