Re: f20 rear tire size

Posted by LenNH on January 06, 2010 at 08:54:10 from (71.192.137.159):

In Reply to: f20 rear tire size posted by Mike Schwartz on January 05, 2010 at 23:59:34:

Just a word from stuff I remember:
36" tires were one of the standard sizes from the factory. This was probably the smallest rim that would go OVER the brake drum. The problem with this is that the outside diameter is much larger than the 40" standard steel wheels. The tractor became much faster on 36" rubber. I once ran an F-20 on 36" rubber next to an F-12 on 40" rubber, and in second gear, the F-20 was neck-and-neck with the F-12 in third (factory specs: 4 mph). Since rubber wastes less power than steel, the rubber-tired F-20 would pull two 14" plows in second gear at this higher speed, with no difficulty at all. Sometimes, it would even plow in third, which I estimated at maybe 4-1/2 mph. In really light soil, and not too deep, I sometimes got it to pull in 4th (a bucking bronco at that speed, probably about 5 mph). I never got to use an F-20 on steel, but I spent a good 10 years on a steel-wheeled 10-20, which had about the same horsepower, and that would pull two 14" plows through thick and thin in second gear (about 3 mph), but almost nothing in third gear (just over 4 mph), because the lugs wasted so much power. I assume the F-20 would have performed about the same on steel.
The smaller tires that you sometimes see on F-20s, including in the sales brochures, apparently would not clear the brake drums, so the wheels had to be kept turned out. This made for a VERY wide tractor. The ground speeds would probably have been much closer to the original specs on steel wheels. I would imagine that, given the extra power to the ground made possible by rubber tires, the tractor with the smaller tires might have pulled a couple of 16" or 18" plows, maybe 3 12", but at somewhere between 3 and 3-1/2 mph. All guesswork, so take it as thinking outloud. Sometimes I get my kicks in my old age just doing this kind of "armchair engineering."

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