[AT] Update on the MF 1155

[Indiana Robinson]

Son Scott did buy the MF 1155. I figured that he would. He has wanted one
for too long and this one was in too good of general condition for him to
pass it up. He had asked me to go with him when he first looked at it when
there was no one around. It was sitting on the lot of a dealer I have
bought stuff from for a very long time. Not constant purchases and not big
stuff. I never farmed very big, couple of hundred acres most of the time.
The farm is a lifestyle thing, I made most of my income from other
enterprises. Still it takes a lot of equipment to do the job. Over the
years I bought a couple of combines from him, a 20 something foot wide
harrogator, a wider set of wings for my big disk, field sprayer etc.
Several years ago we bought a Vermeer round baler from him. He always
treated me well. When I started dealing with him he was a small independent
dealership and a farmer like a lot of other small dealers were. Today he
and his sons have a huge operation with one huge building that is
absolutely full of classic tractors that are not for sale. Over the years
he has bought most of the farms that surround him and he now has his own
system of private roads from one to another. We became business friends
over those years and I was always impressed that when I walked in he always
treated me the same as if I was one of the biggest farmers in the state.
That is the way you should do business.
Anywho... Scott had his mind mostly made up but wanted me to go along to
help check it over carefully with it running and him driving it to check
each function. We studied it pretty carefully for maybe 2 hours or more and
if anything had popped up he would have backed away but he was confident
enough that we went in a semi with a low-boy. I had to meet him at a local
shopping center because it is pretty tough to get even a 40' trailer in to
this farm and this was a 52' trailer.
Everything seemed OK and they were willing to drop the price $500. He asked
them to pop the duals off and load them on the truck.
Kind of a funny bit of irony here... They have large industrial battery
electric impact wrenches so they don't have to drag air hoses around.
Worked really great but to get the duals off they had to jack the tractor
up a little. Yep, pneumatic jack and an air hose dragged out to the apron
where the tractor was sitting.  :-)
It all went well, of course Scott loads and hauls big stuff almost daily,
sometimes several times a day. He spends more time behind a desk these
days  but he is still on job sites most days.
The 1155 is quite wide. It has power adjust (spin out) rear wheels but also
wide slide out axles. He is considering cutting down the axles some so the
don't stick past the wheels. Thinks it might save some doorways. The duals
are clamp on and don't use the axles. I doubt he will ever use the duals.
I have a little Case VAC that has the wide axle option and I'm still
considering chopping those... (shrug)
We have 3 ways to get to the farm here, none of them semi friendly.  :-)
Coming in from the north requires  going through an oddball 20' tall
rail-road underpass that was built long long ago as a bridge over a fair
sized creek and then back in about the 1920's people started driving around
one side of it in dry weather on a gravel bar. It wasn't even a road then.
Later a heavy one lane "U" shaped concrete "shelf" was poured around there
for traffic. Scott comes through there fairly often with a tri-axle dump
truck towing a tri-axle trailer with a backhoe/loader or maybe a good sized
excavator but it is not suited for a semi at all. The other two directions
are only slightly better due to utility poles in too close to the corners
and narrow culverts. Scott  considered parking on the wider road and
unloading the tractor and me driving it home but then we would still have
had to deal with the duals and it was a cold day.  :-)  He managed to get
the longer trailer "buttoned" past the corners with only minimal damage to
the road ditches which were about like quicksand.
He has already been working on the 1155 for several days now off and on. I
can about guarantee you that the first thing he did was rework all of the
wiring.  I noticed yesterday that he has the hood off and I think the whole
exhaust system. It had some minor exhaust leakage where the manifold mounts
to the heads and I know that he ordered a batch of gaskets for it. I know
that he was planning on putting some money in it trying to get everything
just right.
It is important to understand here that while this tractor will not be an
actual "trailer queen" this pretty much falls under the heading of "a toy
he always wanted" like his Harley or his 4 wheeler and not a tractor to
farm with productively. He works very hard and makes very good money and he
plans his fun stuff too. I am not sure of the value of this tractor, the
big tractors (this is 140 HP and about 20,000 pounds ballasted) have never
been on my wish list so I have not followed them. The 10 to 60 HP tractors
are my choice and I like the smaller ones more all of the time like my Cub,
Pony, VAC, Allis C etc.
I don't guess he would mind me saying that he paid $7,000 for it. It's a
nice tractor and when he asked me I told him that if he didn't like it
after he bought it or something failed badly he could probably at least
part it out for more than that...
I'll have to see if I can convince him to take it to Portland. Then if he
uses the semi he can haul a couple more for me.  :-)  :-)  :-)


.

-- 
-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com
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