Friday, June 15, 2018

Back by Popular Demand

Due to the interest that visitors have shown in the David Bradley Tri-Trac post I decided that a closer look was in order. You don’t see them at every show, fact is, I’ve only seen one of them, so this year I made tracks for the 28th Annual Power from the Past Show held just outside Greer, South Carolina. Sure enough, the Bradley was there, sitting on a trailer near the entrance to the show.




Iber Tripp isn’t your average collector.  He doesn’t own dozens of tractors and this is about the only show he attends. What’s even more unusual is that he is the original owner of the Tri-Trac. He bought it new in 1953 along with a plow, cultivator, mower and a few more items for about a thousand dollars. His father had to cosign for him because he wasn’t old enough at the time to execute the contract. The Tri-Trac served faithfully on the family farm until about twenty years ago when it was replaced by newer equipment. Iber is a member of the Foothills  Antique Power Association so he brings it to the hometown show once a year. 




Locked inside a plexiglass covered display case were several of the original documents that came with the tractor that include the owner’s manual, the setup and operating instructions, parts list and an assortment of photocopied sales brochures and flyers. This is the type of documents that usually provide the most accurate information available and they provided most of what’s reported in this post. Needless to say, I was eager to have a look. 




The Tri-Trac could be purchased from the factory for $395 cash which didn’t include freight, or from the Sears mail order house for $409 cash or $41 down and monthly payments of $18. Two 27 pound weights for the front wheels were included . If you wanted to run a sickle-bar mower attachment the necessary PTO pulley would set you back another $2.75. 




Like most of its competition, a full complement of accessories were offered to make the Bradley as versatile as possible. In addition to the sickle-bar mower a 58” cut belly mower attachment with 3 overlapping 20” rotary blades was available for $152.95. There was also a three gang reel-type lawn mower that would cut 57 ½” offered for $198.50. A bulldozer blade for grading and terracing could be had for $32.45. By spending another $17.95 you could own a conversion kit that would turn your dozer blade into a snow plow. 




The farmer and gardeners weren’t neglected either. Accessories included: moldboard plows, disc harrows, dump rakes, spike tooth harrows, spring tooth harrows, middle busters, cultivators and two row planters.  




A one cylinder, air cooled Wisconsin engine was the prime motorvator. A bore of 2 ⅞” by 2 ¾” stroke displaced 17.8 cubic inches to produce six horsepower and a maximum torque of 10.7 foot pounds at 3200 rpm. It was fed 70 octane regular gasoline from a 3 ¼ gallon fuel tank through an up-draft Zenith 87 B 5 carburetor. Clean air was provided by an oil bath downdraft air cleaner. Sales flyers claimed it would run for 4 hours minimum on a tank of gas.  




The clutch was described as being the single plate-dry type-rotating ball wedge engagement type. Power was transmitted by way of a B-42 belt to the variable speed changer and to the transmission via a 53” B belt. Transmission : all spur gear with sliding gear forward , neutral and reverse.




Tri-Trac dimensions were listed as: total length, 102”, maximum width, 80”, Minimum width, 56”, height, 48”, wheelbase, 68 ¾ “.  




In this near operator’s view you can see three of the Trac’s controls. In front of the steering wheel is the draft adjusting screw crank. On the left in front of the saddle is the throttle control lever, To the right is the clutch control lever. Iber pointed out that the original seat upholstery was smooth. He said that the upholsterer decided to add the seams because that’s the way he does motorcycle seats.




The wide stance of 80 inches at maximum adjustment, plus the extra weights on the front wheels don’t lead you think that the Tri-Trac was a particularly unstable machine  yet if you do much research online, you soon find suggestions that tipping was such a problem that it led to a short production run. With that in mind I decided to ask someone who should know. Iber gave me a strange look and replied, “You soon learn what not to do on a Tri-Trac.” So there you have it from an expert. 




For information about next year’s show visit: www.fapasc.com . 



Friday, June 1, 2018

1936 Farmall F-30

International Harvester marketed the Farmall tractors as a new system of Farming, and so it was. The McCormick - Deering product catalog for 1935 went so far as to claim that nothing since the McCormick Reaper had done so much to revolutionize agriculture.  Ten years in the design stage, the Farmall line was intended to be a single power source to perform every task required for row crop farming. Not just a tractor for plowing and belt work, it could cultivate as well as a team of horses and it didn’t have to rest or be fed. Ole Dobbin could finally be put out to pasture, or sent to the dog food factory for a tidy profit. Fortunately for Dobbin, most farmers considered him at least a business partner and chose the pasture over the cannery. 




It really was a comprehensive farming system, with attachments to perform every operation required by the average farm, and the F-12, F-20 and F-30 provided three levels of power to match the size of the farm. The first Farmall was a two plow tractor which by 1935 had evolved into the F-20 model. The F-12 was basically the one plow version while the F-30 was rated for three plows and marketed to farm operations of about 300 acres. It could pull four row planters and cultivators, power two row corn pickers or potato diggers or run a 28 inch thresher on the belt. International Harvester claimed it would plow from 8 ½ to 13 ½ acres in a day. 




The F-30 was in production from 1931 to 1939 with 28,902 units built. Serial numbers run from 501 to 30026. Regular equipment included: belt pulley and PTO, 42” X 12” steel wheels with 5” spade lugs, combination kerosene / gasoline manifold, oil and air filter and IHC made magneto. Optional extras: pneumatic tires, rear wheel fenders, electric lighting and a cushion seat. A wide front axle and wheel kit option was also available to convert it to a four wheel tractor. All farmall engines had replaceable cylinders that eliminated the need for reboring. This feature made it possible to rebuild the engine without removing it from the tractor. 




The F-30 was powered by a four cylinder water cooled vertical I head engine produced by International Harvester in house. Bore and stroke measured 4 ¼” by 5”  for a displacement of 283.7 cubic inches. A twenty - one gallon kerosene tank supplied the Zenith  K5 carburetor and a one gallon gasoline tank facilitated starting. Turning over under load at 1150 rpm the engine produced a maximum drawbar horsepower of 24.85 and 32.8 hp on the belt as recorded in Test Number 198 at the University of Nebraska in October 1931. Forward speeds were: 2, 2 ¾, 3 ¼, and 3 ¾ mph with  2 ½  mph in reverse. 




Total length of the tractor was 147 inches with a wheelbase of 94 inches. Width was recorded as 89 ¼ “ and 97 ½ “.  Shipping weight was listed as 5300 pounds. By braking hard on one of the rear wheels a turning radius of 8 ⅔ feet could be obtained, which was pretty handy at the end of a row. The drawbar could be adjusted 12 inches vertically and 43 inches horizontally. 




The 1936 F 30 shown here is owned by Wayne and Pam Estes and was participating in the 2017 WNC Fall Harvest Days Antique Engine and Tractor Show at the Agricultural Center located just outside Asheville, NC. The striking dark gray, almost black color of the paint begs the question: was this ever a factory color? That’s one I can’t answer. What I did gather from looking through the Paint Committee Decisions documents was that you could have any color you liked, as long as it was Harvester Red. They did offer one grudging exception stating that if some highway maintenance department insisted on being a pain, it might be ok to ship some yellow tractors. You can view these documents along with hundreds more in the McCormick - International Harvester  Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society at www.wisconsinhistory.org . 




Additional resources:
Encyclopedia of American Farm Tractors by C.H. Wendel
www.tractordata.com