Re: Engine rebuild questions for an F-20

Posted by LenNH on November 25, 2007 at 07:04:13 from (75.69.99.42):

In Reply to: Engine rebuild questions for an F-20 posted by Scott Rukke on November 23, 2007 at 19:07:18:

CABLE SYSTEM: Were you asking about the brakes?
I'll assume that's what you were asking, so here goes. Spent a good ten years on these brutes, and have owned a couple of "restorers" since (both gone to a more dedicated restorer when I lost my storage space).
The first Farmall, and all the others through the F-14 series, had automatic turning brakes. These were designed so that the operator didn't have to work the individual wheel brakes to make a tight turn. The Farmall was especially designed for cultivating row-crops, and I believe that the automatic wheel brakes were intended for making short turns in corn fields. Just as an aside, I have a very old brochure for the original Farmall, which makes a lot of the turning brakes, AND shows you how to make a square turn in a cornfield--when the corn has been planted in the check-row style that was popular up into the 40s.
On the F-20, the lever that sticks out behind the vertical steering shaft, near the bottom of the radiator, pulls the cable which applies the brake on the side of the tractor toward which the turn is being made. This probably explains why there were not two brake levers. The engineers probably could not imagine any need for hand application of an individual brake. In fact, in some kinds of work, you would love to be able to apply a brake without having to make a turn (if a wheel began to slip, for example--an early form of anti-lock brake!). On other makes, individual brakes were available in the middle thirties, and IHC eventually made individual pedals available on the letter series.
The F-12 and F-14 use a cam and lever system, which pulls on rods. Same idea, just a different way to work things. The F-12 had "baby brake levers" that you could hardly reach and could hardly put much pressure on, but if you HAD to, you could apply an individual brake. On the F-14, the engineers ponyed up longer levers which would have made the use of individual brakes easier.
It helps to understand some of the engineering decisions if we remember that steel wheels were the norm up through the mid-thirties (I used a 10-20 on steel until 1951, when my father bought a rubber-tired H to replace it!).
Steel-wheeled tractors don't need much of an incentive to stop. Those lugs plunk down and stop the tractor after a foot or two. On rubber, you sometimes need brakes even at the slower speeds, and a tractor with a road gear needs brakes applied evenly on BOTH wheels to avoid a possible accident.

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