Paul: After a full day and a half of discussion and now reading this thread, I have kind of lost interest in what your dad's opinion of this discussion may be. Key to this is your responce to one of the guys, suggesting you know you can't run fast with a rake. Haying equipment in fact can be run quite fast if your fields are smooth from good tillage practices. When you drive in a farmers yard during the haying season and his mower, haybine, discbine which ever he uses, rake and baler pickup are stained with mud, you know there are some quite poor tillage practices being practiced. I used to make frequent calls on farmers, often having to drive across their fields. When you see muddy hay equipment you learn quite quickly to take it cool with car or pickup. Hay fields can be as smooth as a paved highway, or they can be as wash board as any gravel road. Good tillage practices make the difference, just as a good grader operator can take the wash board out of a gravel road long term. My dad always said he could drive his 57 Chevy at 60 mph on a well tilled hay field. Most farm equipment is engineered for a specific speed range and your plow is no exception. From discussion one can quite quickly see the plows you are using are roughly 30 year old technology. Plows from that era were engineered for about 3.5 to 5 mph. Prior to that it was even slower. I understand there are some plows today engineered for speeds up to 6-7 mph. I am not right up on the latest technology, so I'm just gussing on the 6-7 mph. There are a lot of new plows around here and I havent seen anyone plowing much over 4.5 to 5 mph. In high 2nd your 1066 would be making close to 9-10 mph, plowing would have looked more like windrowing than plowing. If it was a sandy soil I'd be surprised if you didn't have burn marks on your shears. The problems with running tillage equipment at these speeds is it starts bouncing, creating an effect on field much like waves on water. I once hired a guy much like you, put him to work doing finish field cultivation for corn planting. I went back in 1 hour caught him with 25' field cultivator and 1066 in 2nd high. Luckily he didn't have that much done. What he had done looked just waves on a large lake in 15 mph winds. It also felt like that in pickup. I fired him on the spot. Five years later and tillage every year you could still feel that wave effect driving over that section of field. The equipment that takes the real bruising in all of this rough tillage is harvesting equipment. The only reason your plow broke is you were so careless you didn't bother to manually trip all bottoms, before seasons plowing, to make sure rust didn't affect performance. The big cost in all of this is lost time at harvest. Combine headers, corn heads, mowers, haybines, discbines, rakes and even pickup implements suffer a lot of damage and down time from rough ground. Harvesters like potato, beet, and other in ground harvesters suffer damage as well as damageing a high percentage of crop. No Paul, I'm not really interested in your dad's opinion, families don't become that inept in one generation. You grew up on rough, wash boardie soil. Your responces tell us that.
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