[AT] Adding electric starter

Herb Metz metz-h.b at comcast.net
Thu Feb 9 17:04:42 PST 2017


Ralph,
After reading your 7:21 p.m. post, I certainly place You and your brother in 
the "tough dudes" category.<grins>.
Herb(GA)



-----Original Message----- 
From: Ralph Goff
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2017 7:21 PM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] Adding electric starter

On 2/9/2017 4:26 PM, John Hall wrote:
> Electric start on a Gravely is the ONLY way to go!
>
> I've seen photos of a few starter add-ons to old tractors. Most look
> like they were done in a farm shop with minimal equipment. Its one of
> those things where necessity was probably the mother of invention. Never
> seen one using the rear PTO, think I have seen it done on the belt
> pulley before.
Speaking of belt pulley starting reminded me of how my brother and I
used to start a tired old Cockshutt 40
over 40 years ago. We were using it to pull a bale trailer hauling bales
for a neighbour. It had a typical small
and well used 6 volt car battery on it that would just give one
reluctant revolution of the starter at a time. So
we found we could give it a little help by standing by the belt pulley
with it engaged. Wrap right arm onto the pulley
and pull at the same time as pushing the starter button with your left
hand. It helps to have long arms. I know some will
call it dangerous but we never had an incident or even a scare using
this method. It was just the little extra boost
that the tired battery needed.
My dad used to start these tractor with the crank but I think the crank
lugs were broken off this tractor.
The ironic part to this story is that we were using our 40 because it
was the "easy starting" tractor compared to
the neighbour's DC4 Case which at times was impossible to start and thus
unreliable on the job. The old 40 never failed us.

Ralph in Sask.




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