Grain drill for Farmall S-MTA

[560Dennis]

Rent a pull behind Aerator at rental . Over seed it with rental broadcast spreader or borrowed drill drop seeder , hire some lime spreader. Will turn out great for you . Mix two other grass with clover , more mix the better healthy growing, healthy insects will arrive ,let nature do the work ,while you have a cup a coffee and look over the soil tests, seeing a huge improvement. Yup !

 

[MeanGene1]

We had the McCormick 10 that gramps got from his dealership in the late 50's, and considering the large amount of used engine oil we always had from the lime spreaders, truck fleet and farm equipment, it stayed in great shape. We would coat everything when putting it away, and always kept a fiver of oil in the storage shed so it would get oiled up a few times a year. Made it quite easy to get it ready to go, and the insides of the boxes stayed solid

 

[Farmall_S-MTA]

The IH drill is missing parts. A lot of important ones (openers, hangars, seed tubes, etc.).

The yellow Superior drill is waaay overpriced. Cool looking unit though.

Same with the two for $950.

The Oliver for $125 has good potential.

The wood-wheeled drill looks good, but if the wheels are loose..... rebuilding them will not be cheap (I have two McCormicks awaiting a rebuild & know that to be fact!!).

Parts will be your biggest hangup. IH & Deere would be the easiest to find parts for. The concept of "easiest" still being a bit of a stretch for that vintage of equipment. Not impossible though.

Good luck!!

Mike

Thanks for all the tips!
I thought maybe the IH was missing parts, but wasn't 100% positive.
Does anyone ever put steel wheels on the ones with wood?

 

[Farmall_S-MTA]

Rent a pull behind Aerator at rental . Over seed it with rental broadcast spreader or borrowed drill drop seeder , hire some lime spreader. Will turn out great for you . Mix two other grass with clover , more mix the better healthy growing, healthy insects will arrive ,let nature do the work ,while you have a cup a coffee and look over the soil tests, seeing a huge improvement. Yup !

Thanks for the tips.
I'm pretty excited to get out there and get things growing on it. It was planted in weeds this past year.

 

[Farmall_S-MTA]

We had the McCormick 10 that gramps got from his dealership in the late 50's, and considering the large amount of used engine oil we always had from the lime spreaders, truck fleet and farm equipment, it stayed in great shape. We would coat everything when putting it away, and always kept a fiver of oil in the storage shed so it would get oiled up a few times a year. Made it quite easy to get it ready to go, and the insides of the boxes stayed solid

I'd love to find a drill that had been treated that way!

 

[Absent Minded Farmer]

Does anyone ever put steel wheels on the ones with wood?

All the time. Most manufacturers offered wood or steel for the early grain drills, once steel became an option. You may want to shy away from anything with the pneumatic tires. McCormick offered a 5.00x40 tire at one point & I don't know the last time I seen a new one. Not sure if the McCormick drills shared wheels with any of their other implements. The wood & steel wheels for those grain drills should interchange between each other, no problem. Just be sure to measure things up before exerting effort into it.

Also..... due to repairs, wood shrinkage, etc, there's a good chance one or both wood wheels will be smaller diameter than what they were new. So, don't be surprised if you find one wheel to be 43 1/2", the other is 42" & the steel wheels you found are 44". If the axle is the right diameter & the pin hole lines up, it should be good.

Mike

 

[Lucid]

Wow, I was led here from another thread i started. Great info here from u guys... Thanks a million. But i do have to inquire, how does the small seed and fertilizer work in a broadcaster?? I'd think smalls fall down and everything gets buggered up!

I want to run buckwheat and not waste a ton with it. Ain't nothing cheep anymore. I also do rape, daikon, and purple top turnips. Some of those vary crazy! I think rape is clover-ish sized, could be wrong.

 

[Absent Minded Farmer]

Wow, I was led here from another thread i started. Great info here from u guys... Thanks a million. But i do have to inquire, how does the small seed and fertilizer work in a broadcaster?? I'd think smalls fall down and everything gets buggered up!

I want to run buckwheat and not waste a ton with it. Ain't nothing cheep anymore. I also do rape, daikon, and purple top turnips. Some of those vary crazy! I think rape is clover-ish sized, could be wrong.

I guess everyone just mixes the coarse & fine seed without issue. Would be interesting to see if anyome else had problems with seed separation.

I use a McCormick endgate seeder with the separate grass seed hopper. Works great; could really use a hopper extension for the grass seed.

Mike

 

[DanielW]

Wow, I was led here from another thread i started. Great info here from u guys... Thanks a million. But i do have to inquire, how does the small seed and fertilizer work in a broadcaster?? I'd think smalls fall down and everything gets buggered up!

Just mix it up well and it does just fine. But you have to mix it well. Just pouring two bags in at the same time doesn't cut it. If you're filling with an auger you can dump them together in the hopper and the auger will give enough agitation to mix it. But if just filling a basic broadcast spreader with bags like I usually am, you want to get your arms right in there and mix it up well. I usually put in one or two bags of grain (or fertilizer), Then the appropriate fraction of small seed, quickly mix around by hand, then repeat with the next bag, etc. Not the fanciest method, but we find it does just fine.

These pictures definitely aren't the best examples nor finest of our fields, just a few pics I happened to have. First two pics show one little 4 acre field. Fall rye broadcast in September with alfalfa mixed in the seed. First pic is three years ago showing the rye in the background the summer after seeding. Second shows what the alfalfa that was mixed in looks like today four years after seeding (taken yesterday afternoon. You can tell it's starting to go dormant for winter). Third pic (also from yesterday) is a different small field with some winter barley I broadcast down in a rush a few weeks ago with alfalfa mixed in. You can't see it in the pic, but the alfalfa is doing quite well - consistently around 30 seedlings per square foot, which is about as good as you ever get in this poor, deficient soil.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. The stand uniformity is not as good as if drilled. But we find very minimal difference. Not enough difference for us to go back to drilling. Or at least, not a conventional drill like we used to. I am keeping my eyes out for a no-till drill because it would come in handy in other situations. But not worth it for our pokey little operation unless one happens to come up really close and really cheap.

 

[paul]

Round small seed like clover, alfalfa, turnips, radish, all work best in the small seed box many drills have. If you plan to drill these products often, you want a drill with that extra box. It is often called a grass seed box, but it doesn’t actually plant light weight winged grass seeds very well. Unless it has the different metering setup.

Any of the above seeds should not be planted very deep. Typically they are just dropped on the ground ahead of the drill disks and are stirred in lightly by the action of the disks. Or spread out behind the drill and lightly packed or stirred in with wheels or a light drag.

You would plant your oats or grain typical depth through the disk blades, and the small seed crop would get stirred in the ground very shallow by the dirt stirring around it.


In a broadcast spinner as others mention just mix the seed well. Where we saw problems with the small hard seed settling out was mixing the seed at home and driving a mile or more to the field. That tended to shake the small round seeds into a clump and it didn’t spread as evenly. If you are mixing right near the field and go spinning, it isn’t much of a problem.

Paul

 

[MeanGene1]

The small grass seed box on the McCormick 10 always worked very well for us with clover and timothy seed. If you ever want to try a dirty job, try combining clover for seed with an open station combine. We used to do it with our 93, using the bin and a grain sack under the ScourKleen outlet. If you think combining windrowed beans is dirty, hold my beer