Are calcium filled tires a horror show?

[JWR]

What's not to understand? No one uses calcium anymore. Beet juice (Rimguard) is the fluid of choice now. Nothing "environmental" to it. $ per pound it beats wheel weights all to heck and back.

I'll never understand folks that DON'T fill tires for ballast. Never make sense to me. Waste of money, time, effort. Ridiculous. In four years of filled tires, I've not had one single issue. No leaks, nada, zip.

I agree 100%. Calcium Chloride will eventually rust out your rims (our family's antique Massey Harris Pacer rear wheels rusted all the way through.) While you are waiting for holes in the rims to develop, the calcium chloride will screw up your valves too. Just silly troubles in this day and age. Best advice is YES fill the rear tires with liquid and NO don't use calcium chloride.

 

[LouNY]

Early (50's) in my tractor days all of our rear tires were filled with calcium as it was simply the lowest initial cost for the weight.
Over the years I have developed an appreciation for cast iron. My brother on the farm has also done the same, out of over a dozen tractors I believe that only one has any liquid fill and the last I knew he was looking at having to get new rims for that tractor from the effects of calcium.
Yes, cast iron at a dollar a pound isn't cheap but it is worth it to use in the long run. We have had several flats over the years. Liquid filled tires are a day long or longer project if done ourselfs. Calling a tire service company can mean the tractor is out of service for a day or two till they get here to work on it. And I will guarantee that they do not wash the calcium out as well as we do and your looking at $2 to $300 dollars for the service before new tubes or tires if required. An air filled tire we can have the tube out and repaired and reinstalled in a few hours even in a 20.8-42 tire or if tubeless plugged in the or the bead broken and an internal plug installed and back to work in less then a couple of hours.
And we haven't even discussed topping of a flat tire with a slow leak and driving it back to the farm or out of a field to were a service truck could access it, doing so with a liquid filled tire creates one heck of a mess with the liquid fill getting all over everything.

 

[Cougsfan]

Hmmm. I see we have some disagreement on this subject. Both sides bring up good points. Perhaps we should just let people do what fits their situation. Adding steel certainly bypasses some potential problems, but isn't easy or inexpensive to do. Adding various fluids also works, but has its drawbacks. I might add I have a Ferguson TO 35 that had Calcium in its rear tires for a measly 50 years before one of the rims finally rusted out . Although I wouldn't use calcium again, I think the argument against it is somewhat overblown.

 

[Bentrim]

In the 60'S &70'S when I was employed at a dealer almost every tractor was filled with calcium and water. We used a special adapter that would remove and replace the large stem using a roller sprayer pump and a 55 gallon open top drum. Put some water in the drum poor the calcium in stir well then use the tractor pto to fill each tire. Don't remember the price of calcium but think a 100 pound bag was about $5.00, water free, just the labor to put it in. Also all the tractors on the home farm had calcium. Easy way to add weight without loading the tractor. Back then most tractor were used for heavy tillage and needed the weight. Iron weights were generally used as the were too expensive. That said usually all H & M Farmnones had at least one weight added, but still had calcium added. It was THE thing to do to reduce wheel spin. As a general rule calcium did not create many issues unless you ran over something and punctured a tire. The the wheel was taken off and taken to a tire dealer for repair or the tire dealer made a service call as most farm tire dealers had a truck with a pump and tank just for calcium loaded tire repair. As for rusting rims If the tire was proper maintained and any leak was repaired there was no problem. they lasted for the life of the tractor. But if you got a leak and did not repair it you usually also replaced the rim if you left it leak long enough.
With the price of labor getting so high tire service sometimes took a backseat to other needed repairs. Farm tire servicing dealer gradually faded away just as did the small farms they serviced, they could not stay in business servicing the few large farmers that were left.
This caused the "invention" of products like rim guard and using other fluids to fill tires, and the increased sale of expensive hunks of iron to hang on the wheels. It also brought about the introduction of weight transfer systems such as Massey pressure control. I think all manufacturers experimented with some type of weight transfer system.
Also with the demise of heavy tillage work the need for weight on the drive wheels has been reduced, but with the loader being added to tractor all manufactures require some weight added to the rear tires for safety.
As for changing the valve -- did that too but you have to learn how to hide from the spray with the stem at 12 noon!! Never had a problem with them not threading back in weather it was the external or internal threaded ones, but did have the external threaded one corrode the nut off the stem part.
As for the environmental issue I remember when calcium and used motor oil was sprayed on dirt roads to keep the dust down. Yep not anymore!!!

 

[JasperFrank]

Been doing some extra reading up on the "debate" from all over the web. I was surprised that some folk are saying use liquid filled OR rear wheel weights. I have both. I think the weights are 80lbs each. From my avatar, you can see I run with a 7106Q FEL on the Ford 4WD 1220. Even with this combination, the back end still feels light and will tip forward, so I only run with either the bush hogg or the box scraper also attached when loading up the FEL. I sometimes wonder if the 7106 is just too heavy for this little tractor. And I am guilty of always over loading the FEL with too many rocks and wet dirt - me bad. I have abused this '87 tractor for well beyond what it was designed for, for most of its life. It has to go into the shop now, since the hydrostaic clutch seems to have given out after 37 hard years. So once its in the shop, the decision is what to do about those original calcium filled rear tires. They look rather worn and tired to me, with many deep cuts in the treads, though there is no leaking anywhere. I'm thinking that putting 4K into repairs on the clutch and new rear tires, isn't a bad idea given what new tractors cost these days.

 

[mo1]

It seems to be more of a debate of tires filled with methanol/water or beet juice vs. iron weights any more as calcium chloride has certainly decreased in popularity. The main drawbacks to filled tires are that it can be some level of mess if you get a leak (most notably with beet juice), it's harder to fine-tune ballast, and that it interferes with sidewall flexion on radials. The latter really seems to be why in new larger tractors filled tires are going out of favor- they generally come with radials and the tire reps don't want the customers to see there's little difference in performance between a fluid-filled radial and a cheaper fluid-filled bias tire. The advantages are that you can often add more weight with liquid than you can with just iron, it's much less expensive (especially with alcohol), and you can always add cast iron weights to filled tires to get even more ballast if needed. My tractor's rear tires are filled with water/methanol as they're bias tires, it adds more weight than I could with cast iron weights, I have a permanently attached loader and won't be needing to lessen ballast, if I get a leak it would be a service call no matter if I used cast or liquid ballast, and it was very inexpensive. If I ever need to add more weight, I can always add cast. Versus beet juice, alcohol is a lot less messy and much less expensive which is why I picked it.

As an aside, we only had one filled tire ever get a flat in a tractor growing up. It took a service call because even if the tire was air-filled and had no iron on it at all, it would have still weighed about 500 pounds and would not have been practical to remove and haul into the tire shop. The leaking fluid (which was nearly certainly calcium chloride) did nothing more than make a water puddle in the dirt floor of the machine shed. We did have a number of fronts go flat, which were/are never filled with fluid.

 

[wolc123]

My 1951 Ford 8n (I am the 2nd owner) has 2000 hours on it. It has always been stored indoors and still has all 4 original Goodyear tires. Both rears were loaded with calcium chloride until this summer.

Last spring, I first noted a corroded bulging area and exposed rubber tube around the stem on the right side rear rim. This spring, it looked a little worsebut I finished my spring plowing before it finally settled down flat. The tractor always plowed great with a 2 x 12” plow and those loaded rear tires.

I replaced the rusted out rim this summer with a new painted one. It was not overly difficult to remove the 28 x 11.2” tire, using a floor jack, wood blocks, and a sledge hammer.

The original rear tire came off in good condition and I reused it. I bought two new tubes just in case I punctured one, but with the help of a couple tire irons and some soapy water for lube, it went in ok.

I did lot load the tire on the new rim, and I drained the old calcium solution into a gravel area where I don’t want weeds to grow. The tractor worked well this year on a 2 section drag and 2 row corn planter with one loaded and one unloaded rear.

It will be interesting to see how it plows that way next spring. I got a good deal on two rear rims and I am actually looking forward to changing out the other side. It was not that bad of job and gave me a great cardio workout swinging the sledge, and some good strength training flipping the heavy loaded tire.

 

[BackRoad]

As an aside...wheel weights -

Was at an auction yesterday, two different lots of "tractor wheel weights"...

Do they generally have a universal bolt pattern, or are they made to fit a specific tractor manufacturer (like John Deere only, or Massey only)?

 

[LouNY]

There are several so called "standard" patterns;
Bolt Pattern: 3 @ 9 7/8 -12 1/2 or 4 @ 9 1/4 -10 1/4,
Bolt Pattern: 4 @ 11 3/8 & 12 3/4,
Bolt Pattern: 4 @ 5 1/4 - 6 1/8
and many more.

Everything attachments has a good selection of tractor weights,
Unfortunately I see that prices have gone up,
it wasn't long ago it was a buck a pound,
now it looks to be $1.30-$1.50 a pound.

 

[SylvainG]

I agree 100%. Calcium Chloride will eventually rust out your rims (our family's antique Massey Harris Pacer rear wheels rusted all the way through.) While you are waiting for holes in the rims to develop, the calcium chloride will screw up your valves too. Just silly troubles in this day and age. Best advice is YES fill the rear tires with liquid and NO don't use calcium chloride.

When I bought my 10 years old last December, I only found out later that the rear tires were directly filled with Calcium Chloride (ie, no tubes). I think they were filled at purchase by the original owner. What am I to expect as service life? Should I get them emptied? Is it a job that can be tackled by a weekend tractor operator?