KennedyDiesel . . . On some of the other tractor threads there is a lot of talk about the advantage to starting out with a HEAVY tractor, but my experience is that no tractor is heavy enough to handle the strength of the modern loaders because a heavy tractor has much of its weight in front of the rear wheels and much of that is in the heavy castings of the engine & bell housing. I have a New Holland & a Kubota (smaller than your JD) and my manuals also state fluid + wheel weights + ballast box. No way that you can make up for proper balance by just buying a heavy tractor when the reality is the weight needs to be as far to the rear as you can possibly get it!
As you have already found out, proper ballast has more to do with BALANCE as it does with total weight.
txhawg wrote: <font color="green"> Jeez, I was planning on using my mother-in-law. Looks like only need half her weight </font>
hawg . . . couple options I see. First, if you have the 3pt capacity to lift her, you might want to just strap her in the old La-Z-Boy and use the whole thing as ballast. Another option is (and I'm assuming she's old as the hills here) you could just wait for her to fall and break a hip, then rather than fixing the hip, just have the doctors snip off her leg, wrap that up in some plastic, and use that as your ballast /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif Then again, you are probably already feeding the MIL so you might just want to get your money's worth and use the first option /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif