Recent content by mo1

The University of Nebraska tractor test lab isn't an academic lab, they are a product testing lab established by the state legislature to ensure that tractors sold in the state meet the manufacturer's stated claims. You can't sell a tractor over 100 PTO HP there without it undergoing the full...

The University of Nebraska's test lab does exactly that- "FWA" is the term they use for any non-4WD tractor with a driven front axle. I prefer that term too but few would know what I was talking about if I used it.

That is not 4WD, that is MFWD. Sometimes people will refer to MFWD as "4WD" or "4x4" but that is not correct. A 4WD tractor has a front axle setup that provides roughly half of the total traction of the machine. A MFWD axle provides a lot less than half the traction, it provides roughly 15% or...

The original front wheel drive (really, front wheel assist in that case) was hydraulically powered, such as a few 4020 Deeres had. It was not very powerful or efficient, which is why it was dropped in favor of a mechanically-driven axle. Four wheel drive tractors are the center-articulated...

There are good wheel rakes and dinky wheel rakes. The dinky ones like to break welds, the good ones don't. I have used the 10 wheel version of your rake and it's not a dinky one.

It is doable but I would not generally recommend it as it is not hard to have a bale fall off of a set of pallet forks if you are not very careful. There are bale forks, but they are different from loader-mounted pallet forks. The differences are that the bale forks are larger tubular pieces of...

Wheel and bar rakes are pretty simple and pretty reliable, just grease them regularly and don't go so fast that the teeth/wheels bounce up and down and smack the ground and they will last a long time unless you got a real rinky-dink wheel rake. Dinky wheel rakes like to break welds on the arms...

I would recommend following the recommendations of the equipment maker. Generally though a polyurea or lithium grease that has the GC-LB rating can be used for almost everything from PTO shafts to pivot pins to wheel bearings. I keep a case of the (usually red colored) high-temp GC-LB lithium...

Use a low enough gear that you are not going too quickly when you are at a reasonable engine operating speed. Exactly what gear you use depends on the transmission. A loader bucket is not that great at digging, particularly if it does not have teeth on the bucket. Think of more trying to take...

I would recommend a semi-mount cutter unless you either have only fairly wide open areas and find a pull-type unit for cheaper, or your 60 HP Kubota is a full-sized utility unit with maximum front ballast in which case I would use a fully mounted cutter. To be honest, if you have a 6' cutter...

Massey-Ferguson had a bunch of financial trouble in the 1970s and 1980s and underwent several changes of ownership after that. That certainly didn't help them stay competitive, particularly against competition that either kept growing (Deere) or conglomerated to become huge (Case, International...

One can run a generator with a larger nameplate capacity than the tractor can power without trouble, the only issue is that the generator can only be run at the capacity that the engine can power. It would cost a lot more than an appropriately-sized generator though. A 25 kVA generator is huge...

A Deere 4020 would fit that bill very well too. They are still a common tractor to use for haying and bush hogging around here.

They basically evaporated in this region too. I see plenty of the old 100 series and sometimes a few of the 6 and 8 cylinder 1000 series of the same vintage around, but rarely anything newer. I saw one 4700 series tractor moving hay about a year or so ago, and somebody was cutting hay with a...

Fixing a broken MFWD is usually an expensive proposition if it can even be done. There are lots of things to break and sometimes more than one thing breaks. Some things result in a tractor that can still be used if the MFWD is never engaged, some breaks (like a broken hub or axle housing) must...