Re: F-12 saved from the scrap man!!

Posted by LenRahilly on April 11, 2007 at 18:08:21 from (75.69.133.121):

In Reply to: F-12 saved from the scrap man!! posted by Nebraska Kirk on April 09, 2007 at 16:49:57:

My father bought a new F-12 with cultivators and a mower just like the one you found. The F-12 was made to "provide all the power on small farms," or something like that in the IH sales literature. I started driving it in 1939 before I could reach the clutch (somebody stood on the drawbar and raised his leg over the axle!). A very well-made tractor that gave no trouble that I ever remember. We used it hard sometimes--2 12" plows, or a 7-foot double disk. The mower was a good machine, and, incidentally, it fit right on the bolts and PTO of the H we eventually acquired. The mower designed for the H is similar, but has a belt drive. Probably cheaper to build than that gear drive arrangement for the F-12 mower, and it would give some built-in slippage. The F-12 mower has a slip clutch in the drive shaft, near the PTO.
My grandfather always had a couple of hired men, and when they didn't have anything much to do, he'd send them out to "trim fences" (cut the weeds growing around the rail fences). My father never did that, but I thought it would be great if I could do it with the tractor. Well--it is possible, with a lot of backing and filling. The one little drawback in those days was that the mower didn't have a powerlift. That sickle bar and all the mechanism attached to it is HEAVY.
I would go forward, "into" the zig zag of the fence, then stop, reach back and GRUNT to pick up that bar. Back up, drive out, back into the other side of the zig zag, drop the mower (some grunting required to raise it enough to unlatch it), do it all over again. I think my right arm is still just a little bit stronger than the other one, and we're talkin' close to 60 years ago.
The F-12 is fairly comfortable for its day. A lot of tractor manufacturers from the 20s and 30s didn't pay much attention to the driver. The F-12 puts the steering wheel too low (the F-14 remedied that). It was designed, of course, for steel wheels, and you couldn't go over 4 mph without shaking your kidneys to pieces, so when the tractor was put on rubber, it seemed incredibly slow, especially on the road--going a mile to a field, or bringing a load of hay or grain a mile or so to the barn. But putting it on rubber really transformed it. IHC claimed 1 16" plow on steel, and on rubber the 2 12" plows were no great burden in second gear. The big steel wheels meant that the tractor was not as uncomfortable as some others with smaller wheels. I guess there were more lugs on the ground at one time, so the tractor didn't bounce quite so much as tractors like the IHC 10-20 we also had.
That was a bone shaker on a gravel road. In any case, no matter how big the wheels, on a gravel road, you just couldn't stand to be on a steel-wheeled tractor at much more than 3 mph. I can imagine what higher speeds much have done to the rear-axle bearings over time.

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