How about asking writers to this forum to give you their takes on this topic? I think many of us old-timers could write at least a short book on their experiences with various row-crop tractors. My experience is mostly with IHC tractors--one 10-20 "standard" tractor ("non-cultivating," in other words) and a number of row-crop tractors ("Regular" Farmall, F-20, F-12 [3 of 'em], A, B, H and Super M, plus a little time on a 1930 Oliver Hart-Parr Row-Crop. Here's my brief take on this topic: Early "tractors" were really engines on wheels, whose primary function was to operate threshers and silo fillers "on the belt." Then they were put to doing heavy work in the fields. These early tractors were enormous, heavy, slow, cumbersome. Sometime just before World War I, it was realized (sorry, that sounds like an "It was decided" statement by a government official--which means you don't know who decided it, or more likely, you don't want to say; in my case, I don't know)--back to sentence--it was decided that farmers needed a tractor that would replace horses, especially in cultivating corn, I believe. Such a tractor would have to be fairly small and easy to maneuver through row-crops. Some of the early attempts at producing such a machine were pretty pathetic, from what I have read about them. They were often spindly and not much good for hard work. International Harvester did some experimenting before the Farmall came out, I think. Eventually, they produced the Farmall, which was, for its day, fairly agile, AND it was powerful enough and sturdy enough to do heavy work (it would pull 2 14" plows at about 3 mph, or a 7' double-disk harrow). This tractor, incidentally, was almost unbreakable. I knew people who were using "Regulars" made in the late 20s right up into the 1950s. They were crude, rough-riding, noisy, but they kept right on ticking, as the old Timex ad used to say. One of the ingenious things IHC did was to create a very wide range of machines to be attached TO the Farmall: cultivators of various types and for various crops, a mounted cornpicker, a mounted mower, various kinds of special plows, AND, toward the end of the 1920s, a mechanical powerlift to raise the heavy stuff. I might mention that IHC had dealers who were placed not too far apart, so that farmers could make a short trip to get parts--very important back in the 20s and 30s when a 5-mile jaunt on a washboard gravel road was considered a "trip"--you drove at 20 mph AND your backside took a beating. Other manufacturers had good tractors, sometimes more advanced than the IHC models (think of the Oliver 70 with a smooth six-cylinder engine in the mid 30s, when IHC was still producing an essentially 1920s design in the F-20 and F-30, with their big, thumping engines). I have always thought that having dealers close by was the reason that, in my part of the world, at least (central NJ), most farmers used IHC equipment. Incidentally, I have never found evidence in anything published by IHC that the company ever used the name "Regular" for this tractor. The F-20 has basically the same chassis and engine as the original Farmall, and unless you know some of the details, they look a lot alike. In fact, from a distance, they are not easy to tell apart. I have heard farmers ask, "Is that an F-20 you got there?" The answer was, "No, it's just a regular Farmall," meaning "original, not an F-20." I will say that in one piece of old sales literature I saw recently, I did see the Farmall referred to as "the regular Farmall," but it clearly was not meant as a name--it just meant, "not F-20." Most of the sales literature of the 30s compares the F-series with the "original Farmall." The success and originality of the original Farmall was a big selling point for the later models--carrying on a tradition and all that sort of thing. The name "Farmall" was meant to tell farmers that the tractor would replace horses: it had a belt pulley, like the older tractors; it had a power takeoff for operating mowers and cornpickers and the like; it could do the "light work," like cultivating, raking and so on; AND, it could do the heavy work like plowing and disking. I don't think IHC invented the "cultivating tractor" idea, but they certainly did make that idea work. /
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Today's Featured Article - The Cletrac General GG and the BF Avery A - A Bit of History - by Mike Ballash. This article is a summary of what I have gathered up from various sources on the Gletrac General GG and the B. F. Avery model A tractors. I am quite sure that most of it is accurate. The General GG was made by the Cleveland Tractor Company (Cletrac) of Cleveland, Ohio. Originally the company was called the Cleveland Motor Plow Company which began in 1912, then the Cleveland Tractor Company (1917) and finally Cletrac.
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