[AT] What was that salvage tractor?

Sun Mar 1 10:59:59 PST 2020

I was at an event billed as a Traction Engine meet around 90. One contest was a slow race, who could go the slowest without stopping.

There was a gasoline powered Cat there also. It was the next generation Holt without the  narrow front wheel but still the long frame. It rode in on a semi trailer pulled lowboy. It had a large (3 foot or more diameter) flywheel that was spun by hand to start it. One or more piston rings must have broken because it started to blow smoke rings.

Some years back I took a small group of youngsters to the Detroit Historical Museum. One display had to do with Fruehauf and the development of the semi-trailer. In 1919, I am guessing all the trailers were full trailers and would have required a dock or road embankment to load a tractor.

I would bet that the Eisenhower party ran the tractor down the road with a guard contingent until it caught up with the convoy at night or a breakdown or stuck situation.

The Tractor Girl South Pole Massey Ferguson trip of a few years back used Toyota 4WD pickup follow vehicles. They ran the 4WD tractor for two 10 hour shifts while the off drivers napped in the Toyotas. They let the MF idle four hours every night while they all napped. I seem to remember the MF pulled the follow vehicles out at least once. The tractor may have also pulled a fuel trailer.

They had a tent they erected over the tractor for when they shut it down to do a water pump repair. It restarted at 20 below.

Tractor Girl was out driving to the South Pole while the hubster was back in Beauvais or thereabouts  taking care of the kid. In the old days that would have raised eyebrows.

In the early fifties I watched an inoperable Cat D2 get dragged into a Chevy box truck which normally would have hauled crates of apples. The truck was backed up to an embankment where the road cut through a little hill. They used a snatch block and removed a side panel to route the cable out to my dad's Power Wagon with front winch.

The D2 was replaced with a Jubilee. More story there.
________________________________
From: AT <at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com> on behalf of Indiana Robinson <robinson46176 at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 1, 2020 10:39 AM
To: Antique Tractor Email Discussion Group <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Subject: Re: [AT] What was that salvage tractor?

When I read the first information my mind just assumed that they would have hauled the salvage tractor on one of the trucks since about all of the stuff I know of from before rubber tires had a top speed of about 4 MPH.
***** Rambling from this point on.
One of the reasons that my father traded the McCormick 10-20 for a car when we moved to this farm was because it was so slow (4 MPH).
It had become a bit redundant on the farm as by then (1951)  it had become tractor number 3, behind the 9N and the new Ferguson TO-20. Dad said that he didn't want to pay someone to haul it, he didn't want to drive it on the main highway (it was on rubber) or through town (about 3 miles of it) and if he drove the secondary roads it would have been over 20 miles of driving it at 4 MPH. It also didn't have much of a brake and lacked any turning brakes.
That 10-20 was not a convenient tractor to use for odd jobs, no electric start, slow (he was farming 3 other small farms all at least a mile away) and it just wasn't the sort of thing you would choose to use to pull a small trailer with or even carry a few bags of feed or seed.
By that time we had acquired a little Model A Ford truck (that I learned to drive in) and it had taken over the primary odd chore duties. He had put it on wider rubber and had a set of 16" knobbies on the back. It had a good hitch and did surprisingly well at pulling wagons. Of course we didn't have any big wagons yet. I said it pulled them well, I didn't say it stopped them well...  :-)
And... he was needing to replace the car.  :-)
Thinking back as I wrote this it occurred to me that virtually no farmers I knew about in those days had a way to haul a tractor... Only a handful even had a way to haul implements like a disk etc. Pulling a trailing disk down the roads was the worst. We did get a 3 point disk about then and finally about 1954 a new Dunham wheel disk.
As I remember back I am constantly a little jolted by just how backward so many little farms in this Central Indiana area were until the mid 1950's or so... Of course many were tiny by today's scale. Many 50 acres or less, a lot even 10 acres or less... Today they call those "lawns".  :-)

.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2020 at 7:21 AM Stephen Offiler <soffiler at gmail.com<mailto:soffiler at gmail.com>> wrote:
You might want to check out:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Road-Story-Transcontinental-Journey/dp/080506883X

See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway

SO

On Sat, Feb 29, 2020 at 2:28 PM James Peck <jamesgpeck at hotmail.com<mailto:jamesgpeck at hotmail.com>> wrote:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/07/driving-cross-country-was-crazy-idea-an-army-convoy-set-out-show-it-could-be-done/
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/4soppqlVp_n7-H09w5qX_xJIOjE=/1440x0/smart/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/T4Y4YOE5D4I6TA7DIX663DUNFY.jpg]<https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/07/driving-cross-country-was-crazy-idea-an-army-convoy-set-out-show-it-could-be-done/>
In 1919, Army convoy drove cross-country from Washington to San Francisco - The Washington Post<https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/07/driving-cross-country-was-crazy-idea-an-army-convoy-set-out-show-it-could-be-done/>
In 1919, driving cross-country was a crazy idea. An Army convoy set out to show it could be done. Dwight Eisenhower was along for the ride from Washington to San Francisco.
www.washingtonpost.com<http://www.washingtonpost.com>

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

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