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Keith: Your right, definitely not the right steering control arm, but there may be good reason for it. Pre 1965 Farmall wide fronts have been noted for a very large turning radius. A lot of folks corrected this by making a longer steering control arm. It makes them turn much shorter even with 1" added to the length. Of course it also make them bit harder to steer. This change worked well on C, SC, 200 and 230 as they are relatively easy to steer. I looked at doing this with my 560, could see that steering control arm was the main difference between it and 656. An IH technician advised me not to do it as 560 power steering would not stand the extra load. He said the C, SC, etc. were the only tractors he'd recomend doing this. He further stated this got started by comparing the front tire angle of SA and SC on shop floor. Some dealer somewhere across North America started doing these and it spread through the dealer network. Whether this control arm was done for that reason or someone damaged the original beyond repair is hard to tell without seeing this one and an original side by side. If you find you have one that has been lengthened, and you want the tractor original for show, etc. Very likely you can find someone using one of these tractors as a working tractor and he'd be willing to trade even shift. Another item I notice and I'm not sure if C and SC were same as SA. There were certain changes made to SA at serial number 310100, same time as SC was introduced. At that time one of the items changed on SA was from the ball and socket type tyrod ends you have to modern day automotive type tyrod ends. I suspect that same change occured at beginning of SC production. The H and M also got automotive type tyrod ends very close to that time. For that reason I suspect your wide front is C technology. Your not alone, when the change occured there were thousands of new wide fronts around IH dealers that got put on Supers. In the late 40s IH and it's dealers never believed narrow front would become as popular as it did. It was cheaper to ship tractors by rail with narrow front. I've seen rail car loads of narrow front Farmalls at Truro NS, with wide fronts straped down on deck. They firmly believed non row crop farmers would not buy narrow front tractors. Livestock farmers loved them on the hay baler. I remember the first time my dad baled hay with 560 wide front, he said, "Give me back my old narrow front 300, it doesn't take a locomotive to pull a baler and wagon." Here was a man that 15 years earlier when he bought an H, bought both narrow and wide front.
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