Heavy Lifting

Farming requires things to be lifted and carried… a lot. To help with that we had a loader on our first tractor, a John Deere 4010 Diesel.

Our old 40’ x 20’ cattle shed had pretty good concrete inside. The luscious black dirt of Iowa makes awfully sticky, deep mud when wet, so concrete is nearly as revered as God.  

To get that field tractor and loader into the cattle shed, I had to take off the muffler and drive it with my head down next to the steering wheel. One false move and Dawn would have come out to find my head laying in pig poop soup.

So we splurged on a Case 1816 skid loader. It had a 16 hp Tecumseh single cylinder engine and no way to disconnect the hydraulics from the engine. That meant that the starter had to turn the hydraulic pump and the engine as well. The starter motor was almost useless when warm, totally useless in winter. Fortunately, the end of the engine had a provision for a starter rope (baling twine), like an old outboard motor.

I was reminded of the twine start by a vintage J.C. Whitney ad I saw recently. For $3.58 you could get a kit for starting a VW bug the same way by pulling a rope wrapped around the generator pulley.  

We traded the Case to Bob Spencer for a 312 Mustang that we still have today. I remember being pretty proud of welding a new cutting edge on the bucket. We took it to T&M Welding for some bushings so the action was not so sloppy. I said to Mike, “I welded that cutting edge on there.” He said, “I see that.” He wasn’t impressed. To impress Mike would have been a great honor. 

We later had an Allis Chalmers D-14 with a loader. It made me understand why some of those Allis tractors had the loader converted to be mounted on the rear. Having the load over the tires that didn’t drive the machine is dumb. 

Anyway, we sold the A.C. and bought a John Deere 3010. It had the loader in the wrong place too but held up under the stress of having to get a run at difficult spots. For instance, the inside of a hoop building stays thawed under all the deep bedding and pigs. To move manure out, the rear tires had to go over an edge and onto frozen ground. The John Deere never broke in spite of the abuse it took.

We graduated to front assist tractors. They got more complicated and harder to fix, like most stuff. I’ve had to take the present one to the dealer twice. We get more dependent as insane policies make that dependence look more insidious. 

That Case skidloader turned out to be a vehicle for karma. We sold a boar and five sows to a guy who wrote us a bad check and declared bankruptcy. Later, I was in a repair shop and saw a Tecumseh engine on a workbench. Turns out, the thief ended up with that awful skidloader.