[AT] Farmall H wide front end

Dean Vinson dean at vinsonfarm.net
Sun Apr 4 08:31:29 PDT 2010


Whenever the narrow-front vs. wide-front discussion comes up, I'm always on
the side that it doesn't make any difference.

With any tractor, operator awareness and caution, spacing of the rear
wheels, speed of operation, terrain, height of the loader bucket if so
equipped, etc, have got to make more difference in the tendency to roll over
than the front end style does.  If all those things have been controlled as
well as they can be, and the operator still has a concern that the tractor's
geometry is unsafe given his particular terrain, as a general rule I'd say
forget about switching front ends and switch instead to a low-profile
utility tractor.

It's not that I disagree with the personal anecdotes or detailed
explanations of the physics or practical tests involving toy tractors on a
tilted board or discussions of the effects of having larger and widely
spaced front wheels, etc.  All of those sound reasonable and right to me.
But at a very gut level I always come back to my instinctive position that a
tall row-crop tractor is still a tall row-crop tractor regardless of what
type of front end it has.  Putting a wide front on an H or M won't suddenly
convert it into a Ford 8N or IH 300 or Oliver 550 or whatever, in terms of
the relationship between the height of its center of gravity and the span of
its rear wheels.

In the end I think it's a shades-of-gray issue.  Is a wide front safer?
Sure, probably so, but only by shades of gray.  If you evaluate those shades
and make a carefully reasoned choice for a wide front, great.  My concern is
our natural tendency as humans to latch onto quick soundbites and boil
everything down to black and white, and therefore assume that "wide front"
equals "safe".  It doesn't.

Dean Vinson
Dayton, Ohio
www.vinsonfarm.net






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