Many years ago as a kid I got to rake hay with an old army Jeep, That was truly fun for a kid ! LOL I've raked hay with trucks Jeeps and tractors of every kind and to me it was always fun, When your a kid and getting paid to drive someone else's stuff what could be better ? Bandit
Need to put a narrow front on the Ranger 😉😁. I could see something like this..... Which Ford should I use today. 🤔 Looks around, sees Ranger, hmmm maybe that'll do 😏.
Yeah and on a tractor that only does 15 mph on the road... or a couple miles over now with the big tires... that's an hour drive... I've driven our Fords 90 miles between our farm at Needville and the farm at Shiner... it's a solid six hour drive. Relaxing for the most part, nothing to do but see the country, and plenty of time to do it. Had folks tell me I was nuts, but then I just reply, "well, not much difference than a 12 hour day in the field at 6mph, which I cover 72 miles back and forth without leaving the place...." Which is true. My brother kinda griped about "road wear" on the tires, but then again the tires are 30 years old and still have plenty tread, so I'm like "age is going to kill them before the rubber wears off, so who cares?" Better than hiring someone to trailer it. Pulling implements back and forth, that gets challenging... the 10 foot shredder wasn't too bad-- put pneumatic tires on it instead of the solid tires; they don't like going over about 20 and rough as a cob-- pneumatic tires I could go 35 easy without worrying about the bearings... main thing is the width. The 14 foot Ford tandem disk was the fun one... there's a lot of back roads through rice field country, not a problem, but a couple decent size towns to go through, I went back roads around them, few miles further but less problems with citiots... worst thing is the Navidad River bridge-- two lanes, no shoulders, so about 20-22 feet wide guard rail to guard rail, and about 3-4 tenths of a mile long at least... basically gotta drive slow on the approach and wait til it's clear nothing coming over the hilltop a mile beyond it then hook and book across it, because you take both lanes. Had to actually pull off and sit a bit til I got clear spot to get across it. No alternates, either. Oh well it worked! I heard a story one time that a former extension agent in the neighboring county drove a cotton picker all the way from Lubbock to Wharton, TX... that's a distance of about 525 miles. Took several days to do because those cotton pickers top out around 12-14 mph... BUT the thing is SO tall that trucking it would require oversize and would have probably cost more than the machine was worth. I would have driven the thing too LOL:)
Pretty easy to figure if you know how long it would take to do it on a tractor and look up the gear and ground speed on the chart usually on the dash or fender (there's a sticker on the Fords that tell you the speed in each gear at various engine speeds). For instance, I do most of my work in 6th gear on my Fords at about 1800 rpm, which is pretty much PTO speed (540 on the PTO). That's 6 mph in ground speed. I'd run a 12 hour day in the field so that's 72 miles at 6 mph... You wouldn't want to rake much past 6 mph with a rolabar rake-- spin the basket too fast the bars want to sling out in the middle and she starts banging something fierce, any faster you risk slinging the thing apart. SO raking a field at 6 mph just multiply the hours spent raking by six and there's your answer...
