DW series tractors ag use?

I was told of them being used in the Tulare Lake region of the San Joaquin valley in the 50's. The ranches had them to do land leveling and canal making building and cleaning. One year they needed to work grain stubble down before land leveling and to speed the job up put several DW10's on large discs they already had. The fellow telling me worked as a foreman and mechanic,and his complaint was the drives would not stay in low gear and the disc bearings of the day didn't like the speed. So after one season they decided it was not that good of a idea.

Hi, Steamdrum1.
As Ray54 mentioned, gearing would have been the issue - not enough gears lowdown in the normal AG working range. These jiggers were made to get up and RUN once they were loaded, a vastly different scenario from trundling around a field with a cultivating implement in tow. These tractors were more in the nature of a highway truck than an AG tractor, including the fact that they were designed to have at least some of the weight of the towed unit resting on the rear of the tractor for traction.

Just my 0.02.

[attachment=32095]DW_10farming.jpg[/attachment]


Kelly

My best mate Gwyn here in Australia used his DW10 to pull discs and a scrub clearing chain.
Regards
Mike

Thanks for the info and pictures everyone. I think I understand what your saying. Run in low gear when your in the cut, once loaded shift up through the gears and hammer down to the unloading site then back to the cut. The lack of suitable intermediate gears would make them un-handy to use as a farm tractor. It would be cool to pull into the local antique tractor plow day with a DW20 and a 6 bottom on land plow though! Thanks again Bill

Hi, Steamdrum1.
Yepppp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It sure would be interesting to watch the looks on the 'knowing' faces, especially if you had some fairly serious weight over the drive to compensate for the lack of a scraper or a rock buggy sitting there.

I haven't operated a DW10 or DW15 but the DW20 that I operated at Santa Margarita earlier this year had some fairly serious grunt and managed to put most of it to the ground too when pulling a scraper.

Just my 0.02.

Thanks for the info and pictures everyone. I think I understand what your saying. Run in low gear when your in the cut, once loaded shift up through the gears and hammer down to the unloading site then back to the cut. The lack of suitable intermediate gears would make them un-handy to use as a farm tractor. It would be cool to pull into the local antique tractor plow day with a DW20 and a 6 bottom on land plow though! Thanks again Bill

We had a local road contractor in this area that a number of years ago that attached a large on land plow behind a counter weighted DW-20 scraper tractor. He was always trying new uses for old equipment. It ended up as a parade tractor for the most part. His farm was in sand country and he always joked that when he tried to plow with it the neighbors got upset. He said that 1st gear was to slow and 2nd gear threw the sand so far that his neighbors ended up with it in their yard.

Tulare lake region of the San Joaquin Valley is the home of the BTO Farm.If you didn't farm 10,000 acres in the 1950's you where a nobody. Home of JG Boswell Company and many more.They farmed with the biggest tractors they could get. Could well have been the biggest concentrations of Cat 60's in there time.

The Salyer family was know for modifying or building machinery to suit there needs.But amazingly kept a lot of old machines in service for a very long time.I believe just several years ago Garlic Pete got into one of they bone yards and came home with a number of RD 6's and 7's.

So just saying there were people with the ability to try new things and had the wish for bigger equipment than they could buy,not afraid to design there own. But they decided there were better options at the time,but fully giving it a chance to prove itself.