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| Interesting on the mud comments....
We demoed and then bought a 9430T with 36" tracks last fall. We put 60 hours on it in 3 1/2 days. We had enough snow on the corn stalks that drifted over the hills that it would spin us out. The last night it was getting cold enough that I had trouble getting our 7 shank 2700 ripper to go into the ground. While getting close to done for the year I broke the U bolts holding a ripper shank on... at 3AM, 18 degrees out.... shank too heavy for me to lift.... 5 miles from home, less than 10 acres left for the year... no parts on hand to fix... looks like we're done for the year. We have a neighbor with 2 big red quads that, for what ever reason, couldn't run that last night and we could.
Fast forward to this spring. We traded off a red 4x4 with 20.8x42 duals. We are pulling the same 44' digger as before, just a lot faster. My son does the planting with a JD8270R MFD with rear duals and a 16r 30" JD1775 planter. He made the comment that he has to be a LOT more careful now about getting stuck. Before, with the 4x4, if I got over it with the digger, even barely scratching, he could plant through it with no problem, now, even if I dug through it, he has to really watch it for being tooo wet. I seem to be able to go through way more with the tracks than with the 4x4. (knock on wood)
One of the big reasons for our switch to tracks is the ride. I'm getting older and unfortunately health wise I don't want to get the stuffings beat out of me anymore, I'm sure that the ride in a new quad would be even better, our twin track is a HUGE improvement over tires. We demoed a large green 4x4 with 800 metric duals on it and was shocked how rough it still rode. After getting permission from our salesman, I dropped the tire air pressure to 8 PSI which helped some, but still nowhere near the ride in our T.
The undercarriage for a T is not cheap. We had replaced the tires on our 4x4 a couple of years ago, about $18k, tracks are perhaps a little more than that. Our old 4x4 has fluid in all the tires/rims. When the tractor was new, it was evidently ordered with no tubes in the tires. Now, 20+ years later, the rims were rusting from the fluid and at $1200 each to replace (and hard to find) I still had 6 to replace, + the down time. | |
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Trac tractors good bad ugly
