Have VIVID memories of driving my grandfather's/father's 1929 10-20 on steel, from about 1941 to 1951, when my father got an H and just put the 10-20 in an old shed with a leaky roof. You guessed the rest. Nobody cared then, so it just turned into a piece of junk. Oh, how I wish I had saved it. It ran great after 22 years of use. I don't think any work was ever done on it. It was a brute to ride on, with those lugs. Even on sod you could feel them jouncing your spine. On a gravel road, you had to run it about as slow as it would go, or else it would jounce the driver up and down and make all kinds of drumming noises through the fenders. Ours seemed to steer hard--might have been something to do with steering gear adjustment. It had low "skid rings" on the front wheels, so it did not turn easily in plowed ground when pulling a 7" double disk. No turning brakes, makes a lot of difference. An uncle's 10-20 with high "skid rings" turned quite a bit better in plowed ground. The load pulling right in the middle of the drawbar tended to keep the tractor going straight, and any attempt at a "high-speed turn" (second gear, 3+ mph) would result in a long slide forward, although it would eventually come around if you didn't hit the fence first. If you slowed it down and reduced the load, it would turn pretty well. These engines are huge (about 280 cubic inches) for the relatively small amount of horsepower, but they have enormous amounts of torque. No kind of hard ground would stop it with 2 14s in second gear. It would not pull any kind of heavy load on sod or plowed ground in third gear, thanks to the power wasted by the steel wheels. On the belt, it ran a 22" thresher or a stationary ensilage chopper/blower with ease. Again, the torque was super. On high-speed engines, max. torque occurs at a much lower speed than max. hp, because the slower engine speed allows more time for fuel/air to enter the cylinders. I guess since the 10-20 had a max. governed rpm of 1000 rpm, it had plenty of time to breathe, and that may have had a lot to do with the great torque. Anyone familiar with the IHC machines of the 30s will know that eventually, IHC put a variable governor on the tractors with this type of engine (F-20, W-30, F-30, 10-20). The original governor, the one with the little quadrant and lever on the steering column, does no governing unless it is "wide open" (that's why they didn't call it "variable"). I used to be such a tractor nut that I would take this beast out to rake hay (we had an F-12 on rubber, but no, that wasn't big enough for this l'il runt--every kid wants to feel big, I guess). If you wanted to keep the noise down and run in 3rd gear, but throttled back for a safe speed on the old horse-drawn side-delivery, you found the engine slowing down going up hill, and speeding up going downhill. A variable governor would keep the speed fairly constant no matter what the setting. Several of the old aftermarket suppliers sold variable-governor kits to fit these tractors, and sometimes you see them at shows. I've always wondered if the ball-bearing mains didn't have something to do with the power of the engines in this series. When you shut them down, they seemed to roll on a little longer than a more-conventional engine (and you could hear those bearings hum a little, too). There were a number of good tractors available by the time IHC came out with the 15-30 and the 10-20, but I don't think there were any made any better than these IH machines. Everything enclosed, no chains to wear away, good seals, excellent materials, extremely simple adjustments, and so on, made for a sturdy and very long-lived machine that was easy to live with. There were 4 in our "extended family" (3 uncles who farmed, + my father), and some of these were in use up into the 1940s, although I think ours was the last, because we used it until about 1951 and the others had "graduated" to rubber-tired F-20's and M's.
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Today's Featured Article - Women and Tractors - Tractor Engine Repair - by Teri Burkholder. One of the great things about working on a tractor engine with your other half is that you know what he is thinking of at all times and can anticipate his every move and his next thought of what he will do. With Ben, anyway, I can tell! He'll be busy working and I’m handing him tools and he says, "give me that..." and I’ve already got it in his hand or "hand me that....."and I’ve got the portable light right where he needed it placed to see. "Run in the house and get me a...."as I open th
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