Dan in Houston
03-05-2008 09:58:57
|
Re: Turning tractor over in reply to Raleigh, 03-05-2008 07:27:06
|
|
What part of the country are you in? Growing up in West Virginia, I had a lot of opportunities to turn a tractor over. Still not sure how we allsurvived. One story I always heard, as was mentioned in the previous post, is that if you are going over, trying to jump to the high side will result in you just going straight up and usually straight down, right under the rolling tractor. I was always told to jump downhill and roll. Neither scenario sounds like good odds. We did a lot of brush-hogging on steep slopes, with a MF 135 and a Ford 2000. We put the rear wheels out to maximum width, and we had the rear tires loaded with calcium chloride, trying to get the center of gravity down as low as possible. When brush-hogging or using any 3 point implement, keep it as low as possible. On side-hills, always leave the brush hog on the ground. When going across a side hill, go slow and keep the front of the tractor uphill to the rear. We did this by riding the uphill brake a little to provide some drag. So the tractor more or less crab-walks. Yes, it's hard on the brakes, but they are a consumable anyway. If things start to go wrong, a quick hard braking to the downhill wheel can quickly flip the nose of the tractor downhill. Always assume that if you start to slide, you're going to slide to the bottom, so have a path picked out. So of course, I never attempt any field work with the brake pedals locked together. Ground-hog holes on the downhill side were always my worst fear. Even though I'm in Texas, where everything is relatively flat compared to WV, one of the first things I did was install a factory ROPS on my JD, and I use the seat belt.
|
|
|