[AT] IH Fast Hitch

James Peck jamesgpeck at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 24 19:45:52 PST 2019


My grandfather had M-H General Purpose and my dad drove it. If MH had put a three point hitch on the back they might have had something.

1930-1938 - Massey Harris develops its M-H General Purpose tractor, the industry's first four-wheel-drive, steel-wheeled tractor. It also has an adjustable track width. Unfortunately, the benefits of four-wheel drive were not yet fully understood. The machine was modernized in 1936 with the installation of rubber tires, but sales failed to increase.

https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/4269-feature-articles---timeline-of-ag-equipment-firsts

[ James Peck]--]Oliver seemed to be following a pretty good strategy. They started designing three point hitch into their post WW2 tractors but selling it as an option. They did not seem to waste effort pushing a noncompatible proprietary hitch.

In 1987 I paid about 7-8 K to get a Compaq 386 with 19 inch color monitor and graphics card.. That was bargain basement price about then. All the trade press was claiming that the market would follow the new PS bus that IBM developed. Compaq the clone maker won that round. I bet right. IBM and the trade press bet wrong and IBM sold out to the China based Lenovo. 

[Indiana Robinson] If they had Al they would have probably been too dumb to make them cross compatible... :-) If they had gotten together and made them fully cross compatible and maybe pulled in some decent third brand (like Oliver) they would have had a good chance of walking away with control.
There was a couple of down sides to the IH Fast Hitch (like about anything else on the planet) but as I mentioned recently we had a new International 300 Utility tractor in the mid 1950's with Fast Hitch. I always like that tractor... About the only thing I would change if I had one now would be to build an insulated heat shield over the top of the hydraulic tank under the seat. That and the steel lines by your leg got really really hot during long runs.
I also liked the Fast Hitch. The biggest down side I recall was that when plowing if you crossed an old fence line, back furrow or ridge at a right angle the tail of the plow would raise out of the ground or if you crossed a dead furrow or dip it tried to bury itself a bit. Not a big problem really, more of an annoyance.
The other downside was that we (like many others) already had a full stable of 3 point equipment and IH was far more interested is selling new implements than working at helping farmers adapt their existing implements to the new Fast Hitch. We only had 3 Fast Hitch items... The plow, a sickle mower and the drawbar. Yes, I consider the Fast Hitch drawbar to be an implement. We kept a long drawbar extension on it and I loved being able to release the lock on the lever and drop the drawbar down and back into an implement hitch, like a wagon tongue and lift it up off of the ground without climbing off of the tractor. I used that extension tip as a jack for all kinds of things.
After plowing and disking we put the most hours on the 300 U pulling the hay chopper (AC), the combine (Deere) and the corn picker (Woods Bros. then New Idea). One thing I liked about the 300 U we had was that it had wider rear tires than I ever see on them now at shows. I don't recall but it must have been an option.
I recall several dealers we knew ordering all of the tractors with a few options already on them from the factory that they kept on the floor. Wider tires and rims was one of those frequent options here. Another such option was often a more deluxe seat.
One big advantage the Fast Hitch had over AC's Quick Coupler was that you could see the Fast Hitch at a glance (The same for Case Eagle Hitch) but on the AC hitch couple you were flying by the seat of your pants and guessing at what was going on down there under the tractor out of sight.



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