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SW Ontario | A couple years ago we rented our 875 ripper to a friend of ours to pull with their 250 Magnum powershift. He was too busy with other things so I ended up running the tractor for him. Half way across the farm the tractor had a breakdown so we ended up putting our 250 Magnum CVT on the ripper to finish the farm as rain was coming.
The CVT outpulled the powershift hands down. When you came to a tough knoll the powershift would start to fall on its face (even at full throttle) unless you started grabbing gears but would lose quite a bit of ground speed. Th engine load on the powershift never went above 100%. Whereas the CVT would lug down better and hold a more constant ground speed. In general the CVT could do the job at a lower RPM at the same speed but when it needed extra power it would go well above 100% engine load to hold the set speed. Even when you dropped the ripper at the headland you could almost stall the powershift but the CVT seemed to have more jam to pick itself up and go!
Both tractors were weighted the same, same suspension and tires, no depth adjustments were made to the ripper.
Since Case came out with the software to switch between shuttle mode and eco draft they have turned these large frame CVT tractors into pulling machines. Do not do hard work on shuttle mode and don't do gentle work on eco draft. When in the field on eco draft make sure you pull the cvt handle all the way back and come to a complete stop before touching the shuttle handle. When the tractor is in shuttle mode you can run it like a mini magnum and its extremely smooth.
We were always under the assumption powershifts outpulled CVTs but our first hand experience proved that wrong for us anyways. | |
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CVT/ IVT vs powershift
