Old John Deere breaking plow.

[Marveltone]

My dad and I were walking through the woods behind his house, where some old farm equipment has been sitting for several decades. I was talking about doing some ditching in a field and wondering on the best way to go about it. Dad said there was an old single bottom breaking plow that we should look at. Maybe it could be fixed up and used for ditching.

We found the plow on the edge of a granite outcropping with one side in the dirt and decided it was worth further investigation. A few minutes with some chain and a comealong brought it upright and to the edge of the trail, so we could pull it to the house with the 4-wheeler. We played with the levers and found to our amazement that everything worked!

I loaded it up and brought it home. Not sure which model it is, but it is a John Deere, it measures 18", the beam has 593 stamped in it, and it has what I am assuming is the serial number of 19302 stamped up front by the hitch.

Now all I need to do is replace a spring or two, weld a couple small tears on the moldboard, and spend time with a grinder/wire brush and grease gun.

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[vtsnowedin]

Interesting that it has a sod knife instead of a coulter. That goes back to the days of horse drawn plows or shortly after.

 

[grnspot110]

I think you'll find that it is a "stump plow", the knife is to cut the roots & smaller stumps as you plow through. There used to be one in the neighborhood where I grew up, usually pulled with 2-3 tractors chained together. It was used to plow fields that had been grown up to smaller brush, then cut. This was in the 1950's& early 60's, it was old then!

 

[Marveltone]

Stump plow? Breaking plow? I'm not sure what the difference would be, outside of terminology. I'm still learning. If you fine gentlemen know anything more on the subject, I'd sure love to hear it.

The important thing for me is I needed a single bottom for digging a ditch that I could finish with the boxblade. If it will cut through roots, all the better!

 

[vtsnowedin]

I've walked behind turnwest type horse drawn plows and still have the iron parts to them. Yours is a later design intended to be pulled by a tractor. You can open your trench and get eight inches deep with that plow but how your going to finish it with a box blade is a mystery to me. In the old days they would plow one furrow then turn around and plow back in the same dead furrow to get close to a foot at least loosened up as quite a bit would fall back in on the second pass. then workmen would finish digging the trench with narrow hand shovels and mattocks to as deep as you reach down with your hand while laying on the ground beside the trench. The cost to have this done, horses plows and hand digging was a dollar per rod (16 .5 feet. )
The water pipe to my house was first put in about 1920 and runs 1800 feet up a side hill and through the woods to a spring. Mostly open sheep pasture when it was first done. I had to replace the upper 900 feet with a ditch witch about twenty years ago. the slope was so steep I tipped the machine over once and had to belay it off maple trees and build a leveling pad in front of it using staked in planks and spoils dirt from the trench behind it. Not a project I wish to repeat. The bottom 900 feet is still the 100 year old 3/4" galvanized iron pipe.

 

[Marveltone]

Not digging anything deep or particularly long, just addressing a couple low spots in a field to help them drain better. I figure I can plow the ditch, then run my tire in the bottom of the furrow and use the end of the box blade to open it up a little more on the top and smooth it out a bit. I've seen people do similar things with box blades.

If all else fails, I still have a shovel.

 

[vtsnowedin]

Not digging anything deep or particularly long, just addressing a couple low spots in a field to help them drain better. I figure I can plow the ditch, then run my tire in the bottom of the furrow and use the end of the box blade to open it up a little more on the top and smooth it out a bit. I've seen people do similar things with box blades.

If all else fails, I still have a shovel.

So your draining a low spot so you have to cut through the high ground that is between that low spot and the river? Correct? How high is the high ground compared to the bottom of the low spot? Point being you need to know how much to dig at each spot along the line you want to run on to avoid over digging which wastes time and money or under digging which leaves the job a failure no matter how pretty it is.

 

[Marveltone]

No more than 6" difference over 60' total length. I'm connecting the low spot to an existing ditch. A pretty small job, really. In reality, I could do it by hand, but I'm using it as a chance to work on blading skills. Sometimes I make a project just for the learning. Silly, but it keeps me off the streets!

 

[vtsnowedin]

No more than 6" difference over 60' total length. I'm connecting the low spot to an existing ditch. A pretty small job, really. In reality, I could do it by hand, but I'm using it as a chance to work on blading skills. Sometimes I make a project just for the learning. Silly, but it keeps me off the streets!

In that case just plow down and turn around and plow back leaving a double wide dead furrow.

 

[grnspot110]

No more than 6" difference over 60' total length. I'm connecting the low spot to an existing ditch. A pretty small job, really. In reality, I could do it by hand, but I'm using it as a chance to work on blading skills. Sometimes I make a project just for the learning. Silly, but it keeps me off the streets!

Silly? No, not as long as it works!

 

[Marveltone]

Did a little work with a wore brush on the right angle grinder to remove some rust and get a better look at what's what. Interestingly enough, the plow share appears to be modified. You can see where other metal pieces have been added to the original to make it taller, as well as connect it to the knife coulter.

The coulter also appears to have been modified, judging by the welds. The mole subsoiler type tip connects to the share

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[Marveltone]

Oops! Meant to add pictures to the above post, but either my phone or the app failed to load them.