[AT] narrow vs. wide front tractors

[Howard Weeks]

My worst experience with a tractor as a 16 year old:

I was pulling a very large load of baled hay on a 4 wheel hay wagon with 
a John Deere B.  It was just about dark on a summer day and it had 
started to rain.  The road was a single lane dirt with a little bit of a 
ditch on each side.  I had that tractor cocked wide open trying to beat 
the rain to the barn.  There was a steep hill that I had to go down. 
When I started down the hill, I found that the brakes were not going to 
hold that load back and I was rapidly gaining speed and going out of 
control.  Tractor and load both were sliding all over the place.
Thought I was fixing to die!  Luck kicked in and both tractor and load 
slipped into the ditch and it kept us in line until we reached the 
bottom of the hill. I lived to clean out my pants and go on to the barn!

I have never totally trusted tractor brakes since then - especially 
hydraulic ones.

Howard in GA

On 4/8/2014 9:37 AM, Dean Vinson wrote:
> Herb wrote:
>
>> After a few "experiences", did some of you young guys tend to develop an
> invincible feeling?
>
> Herb, as a teenager I was supremely confident in my tractor-operating
> skills, and sure, getting a few experiences under my belt made it easy to
> believe I was a veteran and knew what I was doing.  And there was even some
> truth to that.  Not enough, however, to override some other teenager-like
> tendencies, and one day I was behaving recklessly on my dad's wide-front
> high-crop Case and rolled it over on a steep embankment.  I survived that
> incident without physical harm, due 99.999% to blind luck, but it sobered me
> right up.   Invincible teenager or not, finding yourself in a dynamic and
> chaotic situation with a massive, roaring, moving, churning machine that you
> are suddenly powerless to control has a way of making one aware of the
> frailty of the human body.
>
> Dean VP wrote:
>
>> ...It is a very complex issue and the difference of potential roll-overs
> on a
>> Narrow Front End tractor vs a Wide Front End Tractor is stated to be not