Will a Farmall H pull a 4 bottom disk plow?

[C-152]

Will a Farmall H pull a four bottom disk plow? I know nothing about them.

 

[rustyfarmall]

The H will probably pull it down the road just fine, but if you plan on actually putting it in the ground, you'll most likely need at least three Hs.

 

[Mark W.]

I definitely have to agree w/ Rusty on this one unless your pulling it through sand in which case you would probably just spin.

 

[55 50 Ron]

Somewhere I"ve seen that it takes about 14-15 HP per blade so considering that, 4 bottoms would need about 56 HP. I believe the H has about 25-26 HP at the drawbar, not real sure on that.

 

[Allan in NE]

H has about 17 to 19 at the drawbar. Good for pulling a harrow, float or yard drag. Good cultivator tractor.

Just not a lot of "grunt" there.

Allan

 

[CenTexFarmall]

It will pull a two bottom disk.

Dad has a Stage II Super H and pulls a two bottom JD disk with it. And the disks aren't even worn down!

 

[Eugene Beckham]

50 years ago there were a few here used for plowing cleared ground as a moldboard plow would get hung on the stumps an spring the hell out of it.An H would pull 2-12 or maybe 2-14's on a good day so it would have a$$ full with a 3 bottom disc plow. Light ground maybe heavy dark soil no. Good luck,Gene

 

[James Williams]

A Farmall H will pull it down the road

just joking

 

[TMonton]

The H and SH was considered a 2-16" furrow tractor.

The SH will pull 3-14" very comfortably.

Its not exactly a ratio of horsepower directly.

I bet the H will pull 4-14" in light sand but your going to strike hard ground or clay at some point.

Your going to work your tractor way, way too hard pulling that much load.

Working within that comfort range will also help your equipment hold up better.

 

[JT]

I put a 2-14" plow behind my H last fall in sod, black soil, about 6-7" deep, about all that H wanted to tangle with. I don't think you could shake it with an M, unless you were in light sandy soil.
Jim

 

[CNKS]

NO. It will pull a three disk plow. In the 50's I spent many hours with an H and a semi-mounted H/M 150 3 disk "breaking plow". The lower draft of the disks makes the "2 plow" H a 3 plow. An M will pull four. This is not criticism of the posts below, but most of them have not seen the type plow you are referring to, on the other hand, in south Texas where I grew up, no one had seen a moldboard.

 

[CNKS]

25 hp for the H divided by 3 equals 8.33 hp per blade. In silt loam soils, I have pulled 3 in 2nd gear with no problems, maybe 8 inches deep.

 

[CNKS]

Funny, my dad farmed with them for years. It will pull one bottom less than your M. Plenty of grunt.

 

[mkirsch]

What is the reason for a disk plow, and why did they disappear in favor of the moldboard plow?

I have read that the disk plow took less power to pull and worked better in rocky and clay soils. Seems ideal for places like where I grew up, but the only place I've ever seen a disk plow is in the 150 years of IH book before the Internet came along.

 

[Nebraska Kirk]

Allan, the gas H has 24 drawbar HP while the distillate model has 21 drawbar HP.

 

[charles todd]

My F504D is only rated as a 3-bottom, with 46 drawbar HP... An H would choke on 4.

 

[CNKS]

I don't know that they disappeared in favor of the moldboard. They were used mostly in the south. They work better in drier soils. I grew up in south Texas. Warm temperatures even in the winter. In Kansas and in the midwest, winters are cold, the soil dries out slowly. You can use a moldboard long before you can use a disk plow. Disk plows don't scour as well as moldboards. Although the disk plows can be equipped with scrapers, in my opinion if you need scrapers it's too wet anyway. I would "guess" that a disk plow could be used in cooler climates in the fall when the soil is likely to be drier, but you would have to wait a long time in the spring, before the soil dried out, likley never because of the spring rainfall pattern. On the other hand, in our soils, a week or so after a rain we could use a disk plow in the early summer when we did most of out plowing.

 

[LenNH]

The early IHC sales brochures I have for H and M say that the H is a "two-plow tractor." In the "old days" (they don't seem old to me--I grew up in them), this language was a kind of code that meant two 14" plow bottoms. Another term often used was "plowing gear," which in a 3-speed tractor meant second gear. Second gear on most tractors made in the twenties and thirties is around 3 mph, give or take a little. There are a couple of good reasons for this. First, steel wheels rob a lot of the engine power (that is why a tractor rated at 20 on the belt is rated at only 10 on the drawbar). All the steel wheeled tractors I used would not pull their "rated load" in any gear higher than second. Once these tractors were converted to rubber, they became quite different. Much of the wasted horsepower could now be put to the wheels.
The second reason has to do with plow draft. According to a report published in the Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers, February 1920, plow draft goes up dramatically with increasing speed. A "combination" bottom at 3 mph takes only 3.36 hp, while at 4 mph, it takes about 6.5 hp. We can probably assume that a steel-wheeled tractor would also be "losing" hp at the higher speed because of the increased rolling resistance required to drive the lugs into the ground. If your tractor is rated at 10 or 12 drawbar horsepower, then it will easily pull 2 plow bottoms at 3 mph, but will not pull the same 2 bottoms at 4+ mph.
I used two Hs extensively for 15 to 20 years. The first was a distillate model, the second a gas type. In the heavy, somewhat clayey soil of central NJ, neither tractor would pull 2 12" plows in anything but second gear (about 3.5 mph). VERY occasionally, in the lightest soils (like last year's wheat field which might have been disked over in the fall), you could get these tractors to pull in third, but they always felt like they were at the limit. These tractors may have the hp of their predecessor (F-20), but their engines are much smaller and do not have a lot of torque. You could overload the older tractors, and because of their big, torquey engines, they would keep slogging through. An H would just die out if you overloaded it.
I am looking at the IHC brochure right now, and it shows a 2-furrow HM-150 disk plow on an H, and a 3-furrow HM-150 disk plow on the M. Widths of the plows are not given. Incidentally, the 3-bottom plow could be reduced to 2 furrows if conditions got tough. Curiously enough, later on in the brochure, there is a picture under "Trail-Behind Machines" showing an H with a 3-furrow No. 34 disk plow at work on a tobacco farm in Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania. The soil looks pretty friable, so maybe that explains how the tractor can handle the extra disk. No size given, so it is hard to compare this plow with the HM-150 directly-attached plow.
I am pretty sure that the plows we used to use back in the 30s, 40s and 50s were designed for work at about 3 mph. I wonder if the plows that are used today have different curvatures to the moldboard, and maybe slicker surfaces, so that the tractor can move faster and not have so much resistance to overcome. Fellows farming today with the modern machines, can you comment on this?
Always did like comparing tractors when I was actually using them on the farm. I hope all this gobbledy-gook makes some sense.