What RPM should you run a tractor at?

psj12 · Jan 2, 2014

Having rebuilt many different diesel engines in my career I am a proponent of loading them fairly heavy at first. When we rebuilt a tank engine, boat engine, bulldozer engine, or any other type of diesel we would hook them to the dynamometer and run them. First we would check for oil pressure and warm them up a little at partial load and them we would throttle them up and load them to about 90% of rated horsepower for about an hour. This would seat the rings. We would then do a full power run of several minutes to plot the horsepower and RPM curves.

lambs · Jan 2, 2014

Gary Fowler said:
My LS Manual said to break in the tractor under full load. This is what we used to do with new tractors on the farm also. The dealer usually would bring out a tractor that we were interested in for a demo and bring the largest implement that it would pull along with it. We would take a tractor with maybe 1 hour on the tach and hook it to a large ground engaging implement and let it rip WOT all day long. Never had any issues with any tractor engines and that is the way every farmer did it, no babying around at all. I think babying an engine is the worst thing that you can do to one on break-in. Outboard motors for boats have a very different breakin schedule than tractors that require variable throttle settings and never more than 5 minutes at a time on WOT. REAL PITA to break in a boat engine because you cant really load the engine up that much with the prop, but tractors are different animals.

I think this is what we did, with the few new tractors my Dad bought, which was exactly 2 over 33 years of dairying.

As to what rpm to use with PTO, we always ran at WOT and it never seemed to hurt anything, no matter which tractor we were using. I guess there could be some risk to the implement at being a little over clocked by the PTO, but we never had a problem with it.