Time to get hitched.

After several weeks of playing around with the tractor, I'm quite satisfied with the performance for the time being. It's time to start making it useful.

I need to build a category 1, three point hitch. Three point hitches allow you to lift and lower implements like cultivators and ploughs. Since my tractor was built before Ferguson's patent expired, it never had one.







The hitch is crooked as anything. I'm not sure if I'm going to build the hitch square, and leave room to adjust it so it will fit, or just build it to fit what I've got.


If you have no idea what a 3 point hitch is, this website gives a pretty decent description.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_hitch

Smoother ride

I chopped the battery tray up a bit, they sit flat now. That's my neighbour in the Bel Air towards the end of the video, I stopped it there because we talked for a time.

Sermon on the mount.

The mount is built.


Painted and motor in place.


I cut the rear bracket off the battery tray, the one aux battery can't stay there, there's some angle bracket sticking into the bottom. However, this will work on a temporary basis.



So everything's back in place, and works once more. It's vastly smoother and nicer to ride. There's virtually no noise that comes from the machine now, I hear the tires and sometimes the gears in the transmission meshing together. Responsiveness has improved 100%, and it's much faster (as there's no rpm reduction).

I borrowed my parent's diamond harrow and raked the driveway with it. Second gear, half throttle, I didn't even feel the drag.

In which, I give the transmission the shaft.

I've done a fair bit over the last few weeks, but I've also not made a lot of headway.

I took the hood, the side skirts, and the bad fender to a welding shop. Since I can't weld sheet metal at all, I figured I should take it to someone who knows what they're doing.

The one good fender, which I was able to fix myself as well as paint it, got mounted.



You can see in that second picture there that I changed the belts out to a chain drive. After playing around with it for a few days, I was massively disappointed with the performance. The belts squealed and slipped no matter how tight I got the tensioner, they got awfully hot, and the belts were getting slightly feathered on the edges after less than an hour's operation. In addition to that, the pulley on that transmission input weighed probably 10 pounds, which I'm sure is not good for the bearing. The chain seemed like a good idea, lighter components, the tensioner should be easier to make, and the chain would never slip.


However, after trying it, I found it noisy, messy (it flipped chain grease everywhere) and after only 20 minutes of light use, the driveshaft slipped out of it's line and the 3 jaw coupler came loose, despite the setscrews being torqued to all hell. I decided now would be the time to say "to hell with this" and rip all of that fiddly garbage out and just replace it with a straight driveshaft.







I made the square to mount the motor on a few days previous to this. Today I did a single stringer to put the side bars on, just in case it doesn't match up very well. Took a picture of this to show that I do indeed taper plate this thick before I weld it.



It holds the motor on there already even though it's not welded.


Shit, the side supports are a little bit lower than they should have been. (Give me a break though, I was trying to measure it with a steel square ruler and hold the 65 pound motor up at the same time!)


Still, that's not so bad. I can fix that by grinding the edges down a little bit on the bottom of the support before I weld it on there.


Now, what I have will be pretty strong. But, it would be good to have more support because that motor's pretty heavy, and there will be an awful lot of torsion on the welds because it would be a cantilever. I cut some lengths of this 3 x 1/2 flat bar and I will weld it to mount, put gussets wherever I need them, and add an extra spanning support to the whole thing towards the front of the tractor, so the motor will be supported on all 4 corners. Not sure if I want to do it like this, or add another short bit of 1 1/2 x 1/2 and butt the plate up to it directly.