[AT] Update on the MF 1155

Sun Feb 24 16:05:32 PST 2019

I am not sure of the age of your son Scott, it sounds like we must be pretty close in age.  When I think big tractors I think of those Massey’s too. More so, I think of the “six” series Farmall and IH tractors. Like the 706 and 966. I still  keep an eye out for them. It’s a pipe dream, I never will own one. Recently I saw this on craigslist:

https://greensboro.craigslist.org/grd/d/coats-ih-706-tractor-plow-and-disk/6818930052.html

If I was stupid rich or just plain stupid I would buy it.   On my puny 15 acres I don’t even have enough room to turn it...

Spencer Yost

> On Feb 24, 2019, at 10:33 AM, Indiana Robinson <robinson46176 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.  :-)  :-)  :-)
> 
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> 
> -- 
> -- 
> 
> Francis Robinson
> aka "farmer"
> Central Indiana USA
> robinson46176 at gmail.com
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