Gear or Hydrostatic Transmissions for Compact Utility Tractors?

[gladehound]

I must have missed something.

Post 332

 

[4570Man]

Wow! and people say gear tractors are hard to master! (you know I'm just playing James)

It's really not hard to do. I've very rarely used the split brakes on my L3240. The loader makes it too front heavy to be of any use. I use them quite a bit on my B7200 and it's a HST.

 

[John_Mc]

I guess I'm going to stop following this thread. Too much beating a dead horse for me. Both have their place. The choice is often a matter of personal preference. If you don't like someone else's choice, no one is forcing you to buy that tractor, and you don;t have to justify your choice to anyone else (well, with the possible exception of your spouse).

 

[ovrszd]

I guess I'm going to stop following this thread. Too much beating a dead horse for me. Both have their place. The choice is often a matter of personal preference. If you don't like someone else's choice, no one is forcing you to buy that tractor, and you don;t have to justify your choice to anyone else (well, with the possible exception of your spouse).

It took you this long to figure that out.

 

[MossRoad]

This would only be true when you're not moving. Run an implement with the PTO while moving and you can add the extra inefficiency of the HST transmission to any difference in rated PTO power.

If the tractor is rated at XX PTO HP, its XX PTO HP. The same thing applies to draw bar HP regardless of how it gets there.

 

[MossRoad]

If you take the same make and model, one gear, one HST.
The HST will generally have around 1 1/2 HP less at the PTO than the identical gear model.
So there is some power loss at the PTO.

We all know that. Its even much higher the larger you go. However, that's not the gist if the discussion. The gist of the discussion is that people are making it sound like you lose power while operating the machine. You don't. If its rated for X it delivers X. There is no loss to Y or Z. It's X.

 

[MossRoad]

Well, now see, that is easy. Everyone knows that .308 Winchester is best. And in low power centerfire rifle, 5.56 X45 is best. See how easy that was?

Oh no you didn't!!!! :laughing:

Everyone knows its 30-06. They just don't have the shoulders for it.... hey, where's that link to Freud and Fred I posted earlier? :laughing:

 

[MossRoad]

From what I've seen on this site, LOT'S of folks are trading up, not many are trading down.

Perhaps they should have bought bigger in the first place??

SR

Yeah, I tend to agree with that. A lot of folks trade up.

We traded down. Why? Well, a couple reasons. When we first bought the place, we needed to do some big tasks like cutting in a road. So, after much thought, we bought a very used IH2500B industrial tractor loader (just happened to have a cab). I cut in the road from the highway, spread a couple hundred yards of gravel from the cut (got lucky there), spread a hundred yards of slag on that, knocked down many large trees with the bucket, dug out a barn foundation, and mowed between the rows of newly planted trees with a 5' brush hog for 5 years.

Once all that was done, there just wasn't any reason to have such a large machine. It weighed 8000#, was too big to tow anywhere, was too far out to drive home on the highway, was too big to mow the trails, and too big to drive down the rows.

So we bought our little PT425 and never regretted it. It fit in the back of our pickup truck with an implement. Mowed our home lawn. The church, the little league, the trails on our property, hauled tons and tons of moon dust at the little league. In all seriousness, with only a 1/3 yard bucket, it could run circles around the larger IH with the 3/4 yard bucket. It was faster, nimbler, and able to get in and out of tight spaces that the big machine just couldn't get in to.

So, I think it really boils down to knowing what your tasks are going to be and sizing a machine to do those tasks, while (this is the hard part) staying within your budget.

 

[MossRoad]

I plowed, dug, hauled, lifted, scraped, and trenched with this for almost 25 years. After moving snow for 3-4 or more hours at at stretch, clutching about 5,000 or more times during that period, I appreciate the new transmissions a lot.

I now have a bigger bucket on the Mahindra.

Sweet rides! :thumbsup:

 

[MossRoad]

When I was a kid, our farm had a Farmall H and a Farmall BN on it...

Yesterday, my helper and me were in the woods, cutting/skidding firewood logs. We are working out way to a BIG oak that has blown over... Anyway, my helper was worrying that I wouldn't be able to get the tractor into a good spot to use the skidding winch from, but I just locked one brake and pivoted the tractor right where we needed it.

That got me to thinking, how do you do that with a hydro?

Nothing I've seen/owned with a hydro would have got into the spot we needed to be in, so we would have had to cut out more tree's that I didn't want to be cut, nor did I want to spend the time cutting all those extra tree's.

That also got me to thinking about how much I use the individual brakes on my tractors...and actually I do quite a bit, even quite often when doing rotavating jobs...

That's something I've been doing for years, without even thinking about just how useful those individual brakes are!

SR

Our IH2500b had split brakes on the right foot and separate forward and reverse pedals on the left foot, so that wouldn't have been a problem on that machine.

When I was tractor shopping for smaller units, I did notice that some of them had the direction pedal and brakes under the same foot... that seemed pretty strange to me. You could brake, or you could move, but you couldn't brake and move at the same time without doing some Yoga to get your other foot over there... I crossed those off my list.