[AT] What was that salvage tractor?

[John Hall]

When I built my house, we bulldozed what was left of a home built low 
deck trailer. It had a truck front end (modified) and was otherwise wood 
(family had a sawmill). It was built for moving harrows prior to 
hydraulic lift, and section harrows. Dad hauled a section harrow once on 
a taller trailer (deck over wheels) When he drug it off the side a spike 
went through the sidewall of the trailer tire.

I like old stuff, but certainly glad I grew up with live hydraulics and PTO.

John Hall



On 3/1/2020 10:39 AM, Indiana Robinson wrote:
> 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".  :-)
>
>
> .
>