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10/30/2008: "Tractor tilling"

Well, I finally gave in and bought a tractor. The picture above shows it as I first saw it on the lot at the tractor broker outside of Bend, OR; it's a Ford model 1920, lightly used. The story on it is that it was owned by a Seattle millionaire for 18 years before he traded it in on another piece of equipment. All I know is that he didn't put many hours on it; less than 10 hours per year!

The rest of this posting is an account of how my first day out with the tractor went.

Well, the first day out with the tractor was a pretty good success. I got down to the farm by 9:30, and just barely had time to ease the tractor out of the cowshed when the Wilco truck showed up with the new 5' rototiller in a crate on a flatbed farm truck. We hooked up the chains to the loader bucket, and found that the tractor had enough power to lift the 700 lb tiller - it was still touch and go as to getting it off the truck without letting it smash the front of the tractor, but eventually we eased it down.

Then I wheeled the tractor over to the garage and stashed the backhoe under cover there. The disconnect went pretty well, more less according to my instruction sheet. I fooled around a few minutes with the backhoe before putting it away, enough to convince myself that I'm going to need some serious seat time on the back hoe before I can consider myself productive.

Then it was back to the tiller to hook it up to the three point hitch. First I had to reassemble the three-point linkages onto the back of the tractor. Luckily, the backhoe salesman had given me some pointers, but this did not keep me from running into my first major snag: I was short a couple of linch pins needed to keep the linkages in place. So, I had to make a trip into town to Wilco to buy the needed pins (and a whole four-pack of extras, too).

With the linkage in place I then had to figure out how to attach the darn tiller. I took a couple of tries at getting lined up, but it was maddeningly difficult to the arms in relationship to the mounts on the tiller. Man-handling the tiller into position was out of the question: it weighs 700 pounds. Finally, I managed to get one arm hooked, and then was able to push and pull with the tractor to get the other arm in position. It probably took me an hour to get it attached.

Then, a journey of discovery on how PTO drivelines work. It turns out that, contrary to what you might think from a cursory look, the inner mating tubes are not simply triangular. They have a subtle bell shape to them, something I didn't discover until I crawled into the cramped space between the tiller and the tractor to where I could see. Then more fun figuring out how to lock the heavy driveline onto splined shaft. Then checking the driveline for clearance and sufficient overlap at all degrees of lift.

Finally, I got it all working, and rumbled down to the field. I only had an hour and half of time left in my tightly budgeted day, but I got right into it. It went well! There is a lot to remember: don't turn with the tiller in the ground. Get the motor up to speed before you let the wheel clutch out. Get the motor down to lower speed as you lift the tiller out at the end of the field. By the end of my time I was able to just raise and lower the tiller without messing around with the clutch at the end of each pass. Smooth! The whole process is a quantum leap over the two-wheeled rototiller: you go twice as a fast, and the tiller is two and a half times as wide.



I only did a light pass; you have to fiddle with some skid bolts to make it till at full depth, and I ran out of time on this first outing. I went back two days later and tilled all but a center section of the field where Nate had not harvested potatoes yet, and then Nate spread wheat seed using the broadcast spreader. We tried using a section of chain link fence as a blanket harrow, but it didn't seem to be working that well - too many kernels left on the surface. So, we tried using the rototiller as a means to bury the wheat: I set the depth at about an inch and half, and made quick passes over the tilled area to bury the wheat. This seemed to work OK, and I have hope that I'll get a decent crop out of the wheat next June or July.