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High Speed Tractor Brings Bales Home Fast
"No one would ever say it's beautiful but it can go up to 40 mph on the highway and up to 20 mph in reverse. Works great for moving bales out of fields and hauling them down the road fast. I wouldn't farm without it," says Dave Ellis, Breton, Alberta, who replaced the 4-cyl. gas engine in his Massey Harris 55 loader tr
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High Speed Tractor Brings Bales Home Fast TRACTORS Made-It-Myself 21-2-35 "No one would ever say it's beautiful but it can go up to 40 mph on the highway and up to 20 mph in reverse. Works great for moving bales out of fields and hauling them down the road fast. I wouldn't farm without it," says Dave Ellis, Breton, Alberta, who replaced the 4-cyl. gas engine in his Massey Harris 55 loader tractor with a 318 cu. in. V-8 gas engine out of a Dodge van.
He coupled the van's automatic trans-mission to the tractor's original transmission, providing 12 forward speeds and four in reverse. He also installed the power steering system from a junked Ford van.
Ellis bought the tractor equipped with a New Idea front-end loader for the bargain price of $80 and used it for about two years until the engine seized. He didn't think he could find another Massey Harris engine so he decided to take the engine, transmission, radiator and driveshaft out of his 1980 Dodge van which had over 120,000 miles on it. He connected the output shaft on the automatic transmission to the input shaft on the tractor transmission, using the tractor's original double chain and sprocket coupler. He simply welded a sprocket onto the Dodge driveshaft.
"The automatic transmission eliminates the need for a clutch so I can back up and go ahead without having to stop. It's especially handy being able to travel as fast as 20 mph in reverse," says Ellis. "After I load a bale onto a trailer I can drive fast to the next bale in either forward or reverse. It only takes a few minutes to load 20 bales and then I can fly down the road as fast as a pickup. I haul some bales for neighbors and they're amazed that I get to their places so fast.
"I also use it every day in the winter to dump feed into bunks for my cows and to pack silage in my bunker silo. No clutch is a real plus for loader work.
"The Dodge engine has more power than the original one and has awesome torque. I use the tractor's original standard 4-speed transmission as a range transmission and the automatic transmission automatically shifts up or down according to the load. I usually put the tractor transmission in third gear in the field and in fourth gear on the road. However, I can drive very slow in low gear.
"It looks ugly but that's because I just stuck things together to see if it would work. It worked so well that I use it all the time and never made a new hood for it. I don't have time to tear it down and make it look more tidy."
To mount the new engine Ellis drilled a hole in the cast tub, then welded a length of 2-in. wide channel iron to each side of the engine mounting bracket. He had to drill holes in the front of the engine block casting and use a hammer to knock a piece of casting out in order to make room for the crankshaft pulley. He used driveshaft tubing and exhaust pipe to make a pair of headers.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Dave Ellis, Box 103, Breton, Alberta, Canada T0C 0P0 (ph 403 696-3745).
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