[AT] Update on the MF 1155

Sun Feb 24 19:59:23 PST 2019

I owned an IH 856 for several years.  I purchased it from a fellow ag.
teacher in the northeast part of NC.  It was a full-throttle monster!  I
have always been partial to the 66 series tractors but it was too nice to
pass up. However, I didn't even crank it for over a year and it was needing
a few things so I sold it last year to another ag teacher friend.  It now
has a fairly easy life but does get to work once in a while.

The trick to owning a big tractor like that is to buy one that is as good
mechanically as you can.  Major repairs get EXPENSIVE fast.  The 361/407
dry sleeve engines in the 806 and 856 will run a long time but they are
expensive to overhaul.  The 66 series engines are much cheaper to work on.

One day, I would like to own a nice 766.

Al

On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 7:05 PM Spencer Yost <spencer at rdfarms.com> wrote:

> 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.  :-)  :-)  :-)
>
>
> .
>
> --
> --
>
> Francis Robinson
> aka "farmer"
> Central Indiana USA
> robinson46176 at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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