Rat - I've driven a couple dozen different kinds of tractors, too, and I understand your point. I plan on restoring my Dad's old Ferguson some day, when he's done with it. But I'll never use it for anything. As a work machine, it's worthless. To me. There are lots of folks around here still using them, because they don't know better, or because nostalgia is more important to them than safety or getting the work done. That's fine, as long as they don't try to tell someone else that a Ferguson is the best machine within earshot of me. If they claim to base that opinion on anything other than pure personal preference, I'm going to contest it, because they're simply mistaken. I want an old John Deere to restore, too, but it has nothing to do with doing real work with it - their time for that has come and gone.
The trouble with opinions is that they're too easy to come by, and we always think we're right - I mean, wouldn't it be stupid to have an opinion if you
didn't think it was right? Kinda like not finding something in the last place you looked because you kept looking after you found it... An example I've used a number of times is 4-in-1 buckets. Now I know they're not a worthwhile investment for everyone, but every time I've ever been asked why I wanted a 4-in-1 bucket on my Kubota, I always answered with a question: "You haven't spent much time using a 4-in-1 bucket, have you?" And the answer has always been "No." (Well, to be fair, it turned out to be no in one case where a guy thought 2 hours with a rental machine was a lot...) Yet, still, we always think our opinions are correct, no matter how little experience they're based on, otherwise we'd have a different one. That's why I always ask anybody with an opinion differing from mine how much
varied experience they've got. If it's more than mine, I'm listening, if not, well, it depends on how much time I've got and how patient I feel.
Put another way: Taking the long, wrong, way to work for 10 years after a new road has been constructed because you hate change may give you a lot of experience, but it doesn't make you a good person to ask for the shortest route, no matter how strongly you feel about it.)
My problem (well, ok, one of them) is that I become absolutely obsessive about stuff like this. When I decided to get rid of the Kubota, I called everybody I could find who made anything in the 60-hp class of TLB and my first question was whether they made anything in that class that was hydrostatic. Most of them do. My next question involved crab steering and that ended the conversation. Thus came my little detour with articulation. Then back to JCB, because they had crab steering, so I test drove one, but decided I wasn't about to go back to a non-hydrostatic machine. And that's how (sort of, and leaving out a lot of details) I ended up with the EarthForce...
MarkC
