suppose it might be safer to back down the hill. Do tactor brakes fade when Hot? can you use the HST as brake.
I remember riding a foot clutch while in opposite direction gear for brakes along time ago.
had to work because, because, well because it had no brakes.
Whether it's safer or not to back down the hill depends on where the load is. The goal is always to keep weight on the back wheels, which is where most of your traction comes from. The general rule is that the heavy part of the tractor always points uphill.
The HST will not work as brakes if your rear wheels are losing traction and you are in 2wd. Whether you apply back-pressure with the brakes or the transmission doesn't matter if the wheels don't have good contact with the ground. Being in 4wd is especially important for compact and sub-compact tractors, which have minimal weight over their tires to begin with. It doesn't take much to get one of these tractors started sliding.
I actually had an incident like this just a few days ago. I was going down a hill that I regularly drive down forwards, and I noticed I was going a smidge faster than I would prefer. I was only just pressing the HST pedal to begin with, so I tapped it back to the center, and nothing happened except that the back end started sliding to the side a bit. I had suspected I was losing traction, so I didn't freak out. Just kept the pedal where it was and steered, and very shortly the rear settled back down and the tractor slid to a stop in the loose dirt.
What went wrong here? Several things. 1) I was in 2wd instead of 4wd while going head-first down a hill. 2) I did not have ballast on the tractor. I usually do, but I had been moving hay bales at the top of the hill, so I had a hay spear on the back and nothing else. 3) I was in M instead of L gear, so there was less back-pressure on the tractor to keep it from picking up speed in the first place. What went right was that I approached the hill slowly, noticed when things weren't going as expected, and didn't freak out. I was also wearing my seat belt, with ROPS up.
What will I do differently in that situation today? For one thing, I'm just going to leave the tractor in 4wd unless I have a darn good reason not to. I don't know why I keep trying to put it back into 2wd as if 4wd is something I'm going to use up and not have any more of. But even being in 4wd is not enough to make that hill as safe as I'd like it to be. What if the diff goes out when I'm on that hill? So the rule is now "one hand on the loader joystick" any time I'm in a situation where the tractor might get away from me. I knew this rule already, but wasn't following it. Dropping the bucket will provide an anchor, but it will also push the rear wheels back down on the ground.
