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LenNH
03-19-2008 10:29:14
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Re: fast hitch vs three point in reply to RedTail, 03-19-2008 09:56:01
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No experience here with fast-hitch, but quite a bit with 3-point, on a couple of Ford tractors I've owned. This hitch first came out, as far as I know, on the 1939 Ford-Ferguson 9N. Harry Ferguson is said to have invented the hitch and the hydraulic system which goes with it. The hydraulic system not only raises and lowers the hitch, but is sensitive to load. When the implement (esp. a plow, I'd think) got overloaded (for example, sank too deep into the soil), the hitch would sense this and raise the implement enough to make use of whatever traction was available at the wheels. The sensitivity to load is important, but one of the other things that the 3-point hitch did was to make very fast hitching and unhitching possible. You pull three pins and your implement is off. It takes just seconds. Hooking up is a matter of having the hitch arms close to the
part of the implement that takes the three pins.
This is not quite as fast as unhitching, but still can be done in a very short time. It may be hard to appreciate this today. I grew up with tractors made in the 20s and 30s, and later drove several letter-series Farmalls.
The row-crop tractor (the Farmall being the first successful one) had all kinds of things that could be attached to it. The most important were probably cultivators and mowers. Attaching a cultivator outfit to an early Farmall was a major undertaking, with bolts that hooked the front of the cultivator to the tractor frame, and
the same rigamarole was required for the back. The raise-lower levers had to be bolted to the tractor, and then the various arms and rods that did the work had to be hooked into the levers. Probably a good hour's work. This was one reason farmers did not always take off the front of the cultivators during the summer. They could drop the back part and use the drawbar for other work. The original Farmall mower was bolted to the drawbar. This doesn't appear to have been as complicated as the cultivators, but still would have taken some time. At some point in the thirties, IHC came out with the Quick-Attachable drawbar and implements.
Four toggle bolts released the drawbar very quickly. The mower was already attached to a similar drawbar, so all you had to do was back up to the mower and line up the toggle bolts with the slots in the drawbar. These things never seemed to line up right, mostly because it was common just to drop the mower onto some blocks, which eventually sank a little bit into the ground and left the mower slots out of alignment. Pull, haul, lift, mount. I've done this hundreds of times with my father's F-12.
This same Quick-Attachable system was used for the cultivators, which had toggle bolts front and rear. More work than the mower, but relatively quick to put on and take off (4 toggle bolts front, four rear, plus the lift arms, which went through holes in the levers and were held in place with pins--or nails after the cotter pins were inevitably lost). Even so, we often left the front cultivators on during the weeding season. We could still use the tractor for drawbar work. The cultivators made the tractor a little stiffer to steer, but that was one of the sacrifices we'd make to avoid taking time out for mounting and dismounting the entire cultivator. The Q-A drawbar and implement-mounting system was continued through the H and M series, at least. Since the 3-point system was patented, I believe other manufacturers tried to get around this by coming up with other systems, like "fast hitch." Never used these, but I know from reading the letters in this forum that lots of other people have, and I'll leave it to them to
tell you more. I guess I'm still living in the thirties. I really LIKE describing this stuff!
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