Re: 3-16's too much for my M, SM and MD???

Posted by LenNH on November 02, 2010 at 09:07:52 from (24.128.163.35):

In Reply to: 3-16's too much for my M, SM and MD??? posted by Matt Weltz on October 23, 2010 at 18:17:35:

Here's a little armchair engineering.
Preface: I drove a 10-20, an F-20, several
F-12s, and two Hs over maybe 25 years all together. Had a little time in recent years on a Super M, but unfortunately never got to plow with it.

The H and M were advertised as "2-plow" and "3-plow" tractors, but in my opinion, they were marginal.
After the H and M came out they were always compared to the F-20 and F-30, and usually came up short in the opinion of farmers who had used both. My father had 2 Hs, and neither would plow out of second gear except in very light, sandy soil (like in the fall, after the corn harvest). Oh, I should mention that we pulled the 2-12" Little Genius that my father had bought for his F-12. An uncle had an M, and in his stiff clay soil, he pulled the 2-14" Little Genius he had bought with a 10-20 some years before. We must keep in mind something about this: "plowing speed" was a term used in the 20s and 30s to refer to about 3 mph, and that was roughly the speed of second or "plowing gear" in many tractors of that era. In other words, tractors were designed to plow at about 3 mph. Now, I used to plow with an F-20 converted to rubber, and it would pull a 2-14" Little Genius at nearly 4 mph (36" tires speeded up the tractor quite a bit compared to the original 40" steel wheels). I attribute this to the fact that old steel-wheeled tractors wasted a good bit of power at the wheels, so the engines had to put
out nearly double the drawbar horsepower in order
to pull the "rated load" (either h.p. or a certain number of plows). Usually these engines ran pretty slow compared to modern tractors, so they had to be big to put out the h.p. This meant that they had a lot of torque. An H is NOT a torquey machine. With only 152 c.i.d., it is very easy to pull down with an overload. I remember vividly plowing in FOURTH gear with an F-20, a heavy overload, but the tractor would not stall. It slowed down to about half governed speed, but it kept going. An H will NOT do that.
An M has an engine not too much bigger than an
F-20, and it does run faster, but it would not have had the torque of an F-30, which had somewhat more displacement. As to driving the beasts, the H and M are "like driving a car," as a cousin of mine said after he bought a Super H.
The F-20 and F-30 are brutish by comparison. As a kid I loved the -20, but I wouldn't be too
wild about riding one of these broncos all day in a rough field.

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