"Durango" wrote:

Don't you hate looking back and seeing that you lost an implement:doh:

Happened to me discing, the right half of the rear gang decided to do a walkabout, noticed the engine breath a sigh of relief, looked back, aww rats, now have to go back and try to reattach to get it to the shop for some bearing work.

"TomTrack44" wrote:

Happened to me discing, the right half of the rear gang decided to do a walkabout, noticed the engine breath a sigh of relief, looked back, aww rats, now have to go back and try to reattach to get it to the shop for some bearing work.

Same here last Summer. The difference was it was right next to the highway and I continued completely unaware until I turned the corner and there back behind me was that gang of Goble. In younger years taht could not have happened to me as I was always looking back, but as I get stiffer and stiffer from age it makes it harder to do.

Anyway that marked the end of that disk as it was too expensive and complicated to fix due to lack of replacement parts. So now I use an old JD disk of which I don't know the model.

Regarding 5th gear, it was verboten in our circle of Caterpillar. However I spent the first years as a young boy on a TD35 and with that machine all gears were used.

Well as bad as things happened to you two with the broken disk gangs, at least you realized what happened. Back in the day,when we hired “Casey” to do tractor work, he and his crew were all taught to drive fast and cover acreage; they would run Cat D4 and IH TD-9B tailseat tractors FAST. Often due to operator negligence, they would do major damage. I’ve witnessed them losing a ring roller and not even notice until they make their next pass, only to run over it, get it wrapped up under the disk, drag it for several yards, and then wipe out 5-6 HUGE peach trees before they stopped to see why the tractor was straining! Some folks still can’t understand how he went out of business.....
My brother told me of the day when Casey brought a brand new D4D with toolbar blade to us for pushing peach brush for burning. It ran out of fuel on top of the burn pile, with only 3 hours on the clock... burnt up and zero insurance...... ouch!

Back when my mom was driving tractor a lot, she had a gang come apart. She scattered disks and spools all over the place. To be fair it was dusty and it was a rear gang, she figured it out pretty quickly.

Regarding 5th gear, 5th was forbidden on both our 7U and the 4G. They had a really fast 5th gear. Essentially you had a tractor with a 4 speed tranny.
Now, on the later Special Application (SA) ag tractors, the transmissions could be ordered with a “working” or “farming” high gear. As an example our D4E went the same speed in 5th as our 7U did in 4th. Likewise my D6C SA goes the same in 6th as the 7U went in 4th.

This gives you much smaller splits between gears so you may choose one that closer matches the desired speed, which is nice.

BP.

Neil: Around here, the orchardists didn’t want drivers going beyond 3rd due to safety reasons and minimizing dust ( bad for trees, not so much the driver). That was a fairly comfortable speed dodging tree limbs and hanging off of the tailseat(seen many without the backrest or the railing around the base).
Several neighbors went as far as welding the shifting slots with square stock, making it impossible to go into 4th or 5th.
In open fields we could run 4th if the tractor had enough power...
We didn’t own any SA machines with the closer spaced working speeds; 5th might have been just for “walking” the machine to a new field, and at half throttle.
The only time I ever ran high gear “balls out” was when I had to do wintertime dormant spraying, pulling a 500 gallon engine powered spray rig on tracks to refill at the standpipe/wellhead. Ground was soft and wet, not so hard on components I thought.

"Neil" wrote:

Makes sense JM. On a towed scraper, which requires "production", it would be full throttle / top gear I'd presume?

My 2U D8 which when new was a scraper tractor has 5th gear locked out. It was quite common for dirt contractors to have them locked out in this part of the country. I guess it was the only sure way to keep the hired hands from burning the tracks off of them.

Our RD4 won’t hardly pull itself in 5th let alone pull something. There was a logger here that had a strict rule about travel speed. He had a fleet of 3T D7 tractors, the rule was 1rst gear pulling logs to the landing and 2nd gear back to the woods. Period.

I would think the bottom roller bearings would take the most abuse at high speeds. I imagine they’re cooking right along. I could be wrong though.

BP