[NUTNDUN]

Vote Now for Featured Tractor of the Month for June 2012​

Bolens Ride A Matic - antiquetractors	25	17.48%
Wheel Horse 401 - JakeKuhn	50	34.97%
White's Ranger 16 - Texas Deere and Horse	8	5.59%
Panzer 1107 - 1978Murray	4	2.80%
Cub Cadet 123 - LTD	8	5.59%
Massey MF12H - IHCubGuy	10	6.99%
Tiger 883 - Ryan313	13	9.09%
GTV/16 - KennyP	9	6.29%
SIMAR Rototiller - new restorer	6	4.20%
Homelite 526 - bud119195	6	4.20%
MTD 990 wrbourget	4	2.80%

 

[NUTNDUN]

Voting for GTtalk Featured Tractor of the Month for the month of June 2012 has now officially started and will end the last day of May. This was one of our open months where anything goes.

The winner will be featured on the GTtalk Home Page for the entire month of May and in our Featured Tractor Section for infinity. Our featured tractor winners are also printed in the LAGT magazine so if you are not a subscriber you are missing out.

We have 11 nominations this month, I have put them in the order the poll is so hopefully it makes it a little easier.

• Bolens Ride A Matic - antiquetractors
• Wheel Horse 401 - JakeKuhn
• White's Ranger 16 - Texas Deere and Horse
• Panzer 1107 - 1978Murray
• Cub Cadet 123 - LTD
• Massey Ferguson MF12H - IHCubGuy
• Tiger 883 - Ryan313
• GTV/16 - KennyP
• SIMAR Rototiller - new restorer
• Homelite 526 - bud119195
• MTD 990 - wrbourget

Before voting please be sure to check out all the entries in the posts below.

Please remember that the winning tractor cannot be nominated again for a full year. Thanks and good luck!

 

[antiquetractors]

I would like to nominate my 58 Ride A Matic as a "true survivor".

If you hang out in the Bolens section you have probably seen some of my posts. I have a 1958 Bolens Deluxe Ride A Matic. I am the second owner of this fine machine. I purchased the tractor last October at the former owners estate sale for $112. His daughters were there to give me some history of the tractor. I spent several hours literally digging it out of the ground and hauiling it home but after a new condersor and spark plug she fired right up. It had sat for close to 30 years without being touched. The dust and rust had taken its toll on the paint job and rear wheels, The tractor cleaned up rather well all things considered. I have so far replaced the magneto, points, condensor and spark plug and ofcourse rear wheels. This tractor came with the original center mounted rotary mower, wheel weights, a mold board plow andI have aquired a snow blade thanks to ebay. I take the old girl out for a spin almost everyday with my 4 year old daughter at the wheel. I have started the full restoration as a nice father/daughter project for her have something that can just be "ours". I enjoy telling my story of how I came across this machine so I hope you enjoyed it as well.

I keep in regular contact with the family that had the tractor as they were very excited to see the restoration and even sparked an interest into the hobby. I have this information about how the tractor was used. "Dad's name is Kenneth M****r. Dad was born in the Bethel area and mostly grew up in the Goshen area. Dad and Mom bought the property in Loveland after he was discharged from World War II. When they bought that property there was a small house and the barn on it. Where you parked your truck when you came to pick up the tractor was where the old house used to be. We had it torn down about 2 years ago as Dad had rented it for many years after he had the house in back of the barn built in the early 60s. They owned about 5 or 6 acres, as the property line goes way back beyond the house and most all of that land was a garden in those days. As Mom and Dad got older, they put out a smaller garden up close to the barn. We didn't have much money but we always ate well because of the good food from the garden and Mom was a wonderful cook. Those were the good old days even though we didn't think so at the time. Karen and I both want to come to the tractor show so I will keep that date open, if any thing changes, let me know."

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNxjoLuCcdc&feature=relmfu[/media]

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFp0jc5RSCE&list=UU3DQoaryv5x15-cbwVw53Lg&index=4&feature=plcp

 

[JakeKuhn]

This post has been promoted to an article

 

[Texas Deere and Horse]

I am going to add my Original "White's Hardware Ranger 16" to the mix. I believe it is a 1973 MTD 16hp 990 in the White's badges. White's Hardware was a locally owned hardware chain here in central TX. I found this tractor a few months ago on CL and made the deal for it. It has a 16 HP Briggs that runs very strong. It has a 2-speed trans axle and full hydraulics, both lift and drive. It came with a mounted 3 pt hitch and a 42" mower deck. I have not had to do a thing to it, but use it. It does have slow leaks in both front tires, so I a m going to have to fix those. All the decals are in great shape, even the I.D. tags are in very nice shape. It even still has the original muffler on it and in good shape.

I never thought I would own a MTD until I was at "olcowhands" place and saw his "Unico 15". I didn't know that MTD built such a tough and rugged tractor, but I am very impressed by this tractor. I was going to restore this one, but have decided to leave it as it i and give it a good clean up, rub the paint out and maybe clear coat it. I am going to repaint the front rims when I break them down to fix the slow leak. If you have never seen or looked at one of the big MTD's, please do and you will also be very impressed.

This is a test spot on cleaning it up.

 

[1978murray]

I would like to nominate my 1968 Panzer 1107. I pulled this tractor from a barn last spring. It had tons of surface rust and non of the metal was straight. I spent a lot of time getting it run right and now its a perfect tractor. Last fall i got new sheet metal from cookiemonster, thanks to him, my panzer now has decent metal on it.

This year the panzer has the mowing job. With the original deck on the panzer looks sharp. This tractor is the only one that gets kept inside. I wash it twice every month and it is well maintained. I hope you all enjoy.

 

[LTD]

I would like to nominate my 1966 Cub Cadet 123.
I bought this tractor about two years ago. It came with a tiller,snowthrower, windbreaker cab,brinly plow,cultivator,mower deck,and a 125 Cub Cadet parts tractor. When I bought it, it smoked very,very badly. I installed new rings in it and now it runs like a dream. I mainly use it for tilling and snowthrowing. The first winter I had it, we got a big storm which left a couple of feet of snow. The 123 was the only tractor I had for snow removal at the time and it worked beautiful.
It has the 12 horse Kohler K301 with a hydrostatic transmission. The taillight and headlights came origional on it. It has the spring assist for lifting the tiller(although it is still heavy to lift). I recently bought a Haban sickle bar mower I am goingto hook up to it, so I can mow the ditches and dikes around the place.It was painted at some time rather poorly and I hope to restore it someday.

 

[IHCubGuy]

I'll throw my 69 Massey Ferguson 12H in the mix as a contendor. I bought this tractor along with a MF7 from a guy I work with last year. The tractor did not run and it was in need of a bit of freshening up as well. First job was to determine why it did not run. What I found was that the solid state ignition did not throw spark and in the process of checking this determined that the starter was toasted inside as well. This left me with a decision as to what to do and I researched getting the ignition redone and buying a new starter. The tractor sat for most of the summer without progress as I decided what to do. I ended up making the call to replace the HH120 Tecumseh engine with a K301 Kohler. The main reason for this was that I could acquire a good running Kohler for the same price as it would take me just to get the Tecumseh going and still not know how well it ran. The downside of this was that the Kohler K301 has a deep sump oil pan that extends down below where it bolts to the frame and the Tecumseh did not. This was a problem as the design of the Massey frame has the engine sit on top of it and the frame is flat on top with no where for the oil pan to go. After some measuring and mockup I determined I could cut a hole in the frame that the oil pan could sit down inside of. The only thing I needed to be concerned with here was that the front axles rear support on the tractor frame would have to be boxed in to resupport it. With the modification done the engine fit in with only one other problem. The side of the engine towards the fuel tank and dash allowed no room for me to use a geardrive flywheel starter. The solution to this was to situate an older style starter generator in front of the engine just behind the grill. Using the bracket from the starter generator that would bolt to the engine I drilled two holes in the frame and bolted the bracket down and it lined up without intereference from the grill. To allow the starter generator to do its job I welded onto the Massey stack pulley another pulley on the engine side that runs to it. My next obstacle was a little more tricky. The engine crankshaft on the Kohler was a 1" shaft whereas the Tecumseh crank was 1 1/8" and the Tecumseh crank was longer to boot by about 1 1/4" which created a problem with the puley that runs the transmission lining up and fitting on. To fix this problem I went to a good machinist friend to see if he could make me a sleeve for the crank to increase the shaft diameter and that would also be a stub shaft to extend the cranks length and do it all in one piece. This piece would also be machined with a keyway that would line up with the Kohlers keyway. He accepted the job and a week later I had the very piece I needed to make it work. I also had him center drill the stub shaft end of it so I could thread a bolt into the Kohler crank to secure it on. He also made me a new 5/16" x 1/4" keystock that ran the entire length of the new piece in order to allow my modified stack pulley to have a common keyway.

With the major modifications to the tractor out of the way I could finally turn my attention towards the actual restoration of the tractor. For the most part the restoration was fairly straight forward with no major issues. The plastic dash was cracked at it's mounting points and was swapped out with the one from the MF7. The plastic nose ring on the front was also cracked and broken and it too was swapped out for the one off of the MF7. The hood needed to have some surgery to it as someone at one point in its life decided the the battery wouldn't fit in and they did a crude job of taking the curl out of the side of it. This was corrected by clamping a piece of 1/2" round rod to the inside of the curl and hammering the hood back into its proper shape. The front of the hood where the headlights sit needed to be welded up as it had several cracks in it and was out of shape as well. With these things fixed I cleaned up the entire tractor and painted it with the appropriate Massey Ferguson color scheme and gave it a new set of decals and sneakers as well as a custom vertical exhaust. With the switch to the Kohler I was able to reuse the existing throttle and choke handles by putting a new cable setup onto them and making them the length I needed. Since I used a Kohler out of a Cub Cadet I also used the entire wiring setup from a Cub Cadet including the amp gauge, keyswitch, voltage regulator, solenoid and the main harness. I had to move some of the locations of the electrical components to fit them in with the Kohler and as luck would have it the wiring harness from the Cub was longer than I needed so I only had to clip the ends of some of the wires and add new connectors to them. With the wiring done it was time to test fire and take it for a spin. Other than needing an adjustment of the Hydro lever and finding that the routing of the fuel line resulted in the need of adding a mechanical fuel pump to the engine it works like a top.

Since I initially purchased the tractor I have also purchsed a snow thrower for it as well and plan to rebuild the deck in the coming weeks to actually put this machine back to work and make it earn it's keep.

It was the purchase of this tractor that led me here to the GTtalk website. I have to say that having been on many other websites for a long time this site by far made me feel right at home from the first night I posted. I still hang out at my other haunts but this has become my new homepage thanks to all the great people that are a part of it. It's thanks to all of the people on the site that my Massey got to where it is today as without it I would have been lost on several aspects of the project. To anyone that helped answer my questions a big THANK YOU goes to all of you.

Thanks,
Chad Bingaman

 

[Ryan313]

I will add my '52 Tiger 883 serial number 2225 to the list. I found my Tiger behind a gas station. My Father knew the owners quite well and did tire srvice for them often. He saw it one day and asked about it and the owner said it was in his mother's basement for the last 20 years and they had to clean out after she passed away and he said it was not long after taking it out of the basement that we found it. The gas station owner's mother and father were the original owners.

The tractor was restored by my father and I during the winter of 2006-2007. It was painted with Oliver Green, and Caterpillar Yellow. It was painted the original color scheme and some accent pieces of stainless-steel in the shapes of flames were added. The original 6.00-16 tires were taken off and replaced with a set of 26-12x12 Carliele Tru Power lug tires. A set of five lug twelve inch wheels had the centers cut out, and new centers welded in to fit the six lug hubs this tractor has.

This contraption has no belts, all chain and no slipping. the engine has a chain to the transmission, the transmission has a chain to a solid axle. The transmission has a unique internal duel clutch system. Move the lever forward and it catches on one clutch, pull it backwards and it will grab with the other clutch. It has no brakes, to stop you simply pull the shifter lever in the opposite direction of travel and the clutch grabs and brings the tractor to a halt.The right side has one lug in the wheel mount hub and one lug on the drive plate that attaches to the axle. The left side has six lugs in the wheel hub and a ratcheting arm on the drive plate. This particular set-up causes the left wheel to engage before the right. If the left wheel slips on soft ground then the right side grabs and that locks both wheels. In reverse the ratchet on the left will not grab but after one full rotation of the right hub the lugs in the hub will grab and drive the tractor in reverse.

After restoring the tractor, it ran great but, whenever it left my house it would have problems with the carburetor adjustments. Whether it was a show, or tractor pull it would become temperamental and have issues. I brought the tractor to a few pulls but only got to pull one time with it. The one time I was able to pull with it it stalled mid-pull but it was still enough to take the win. It was entered into a car show, it was in the other category. There were about 10 cars in the class, it got 2nd place. There was an all original Delorean there that supposedly never lost a show and that got 3rd. I went to a tractor parade with it but, unfortunately I did not get a chance to drive it in the parade. It did however, get a lot of questions, a lot of pictures and a lot of looks.

 

[KennyP]

1981 GTV/16

This is my first GT that I got for free around 1989. The engine was kaput, but I was given an Onan B43 and incorporated into it. Along with the tractor, I also got the 917.252390 sleeve hitch blade. Within a few weeks, I had it running. At that time, I had no manual for the tractor. So it was by trial and error getting the variable speed system tweaked to work correctly. I put it to use mainly to pull around the engine hoist that I adapted air tires to. At the time, I had a 3-car garage, but no concrete outside, so I needed something that would allow me to move heavy things around on the gravel.
When I moved back to Tulsa, this tractor was left in Wichita along with the hoist for duties up there. Not being used very often, it became just a yard ornament. So, last summer I brought it home and got it running again. After looking a the tractor for a few months, I decided it should have a new paint job to get rid of it's nickname of 'Ol Ugly. The hood was cracked, no head lights, grille shell was bent and missing the center section. Thanks to a couple of great members here, I got a very nice hood, complete grille, and headlights to put on it. That set the ball in motion.
I decided I wanted to add a 3-point on it, so with with the help of another great member here, I was able to adapt a power steering pump to the front of the Onan and add hydraulics. Another member contributed a valve and I found another valve and cylinder on e-bay to add to the mix. After much head scratching and more parts obtained from members, I was able to get a Cat 0 3-point set up on the tractor. I still need to plumb the hydraulics. That will come before long.
I took the tractor apart for just a repaint, but went a bit further and fixed a few issues while I had things apart. Another member had contributed a pair of 26X12 tires and I needed more fender clearance. So the fender pan was raised 1", which allowed the installation of the valve under the pan. I had to add 2.5" to the rear wheel width for the bigger tires, also.
The paint is spray can, not perfect, but much better than it looked before. I chose Charcoal Gray, w/ Red highlights, and a black frame for the colors. Another member here made up the decals for me. So, thanks to this great site, I am very happy with the outcome of my labor. There are a few more things to be added, but 'Big Bertha' is a much better name for this tractor now. My thanks to everyone here who has helped make this possible.
First is a couple before pics:

[sharedmedia=core:attachments:24323] [sharedmedia=core:attachments:19908]

Now, the finished product:
[sharedmedia=core:attachments:31526] [sharedmedia=core:attachments:31525]

[sharedmedia=core:attachments:31528]
The decals are in the mail!

Update! Decals are installed:

 

[drbish]

I am going to nominate my sort of garden tractor.It is my early 1930 SIMAR rototiller,It was imported from Sweden,to New York .My SIMAR C2J was made from Feb 24 1932 until March 8 1940,I have only had this for a little time but said my next purchase was going to be one that very few people has seen. This machine has been indoors most of its life and runs very well,sounds like a chainsaw since it is a two stroke engine,and only is rated at 2.5 horsepower,it is all original except for the rubber bushing that is on the intake.It even had the original air filter in it

 

[bud119195]

I would like to nominate My Homelite 526, Got this tractor in trade for doing some work for a guy and had no clue what I was going to do with it.So it sat for a while and I finally took it apart and started a complete redo on it.
When i got it, it had a 5hp tecumsah that was shot so I pilled it out and installed a 5hp Briggs.Tractor was completely tore apart and repainter with Duplicolor automative Paint. I cleaned the transmission up the best i could.And installed all new drive chains and tires.
Had New decals Made form Daniel (olcowhand)and he did a excellent job matching it up form a picture that I emailed him
As you can see in the pic transmission is kinda weird,Everyone I talk to at a show say they have never seen anything like it. It is a fun little tractor to drive and I am glad I kept it any restored it.Makes for some good conversation at tractor shows

 

[wrbourget]

I bought this tractor as a Farmking but there was something different about it,out of all the 990s i had ever seen they all had vertical slots in the grill this one had horizontal ones, for the longest time no one could tell me why this was. I asked every one and got so many different answers as to why this was, it was because it was a 1968 Farmking to it was a custom grill and so on. Finally i talked to someone here on GTtalk and he had the answer I was looking for, I can't remember who it was that had the answer but he was right on the money. As it turns out it's a Columbia and I'm told it's a fairly rare version of the 990, to date i know of one that is in the hands of a collector. I'm sure there is some out there that i haven't found yet and if there is contact me i would like to find out all i can about this tractor.
I don't know the year it is a 16hp it's somewhere between 70 and74 it is un restored and i like it this way because i do use it. This is the first garden tractor with a hydro 3 point hitch i have ever owned and i use this tractor all the time. I plow my garden and i have a set of harrows and a spike harrow for it, a back blade, and i have a large 16hp chipper i made to fit the 3 point. MTD really had something here it has a perfect balance of power, weight, and traction, combined with a high and low range i don't think anything can touch the performance of this tractor. Anny 990 owner can tell about these things there just a great all around tractor I'm glad i bought this one.

My prised tractors

• wrbourget
• Feb 5, 2012

That 990 is so much bigger than the rest

Its a monster compared to other Garden tractors

• wrbourget
• Feb 5, 2012

I still cant get over how big this thing is.

990 cooling off after pulling stumps

• wrbourget
• Nov 15, 2011

My 990 after pulling some stumps Lilacs taking over a big part of the yard. They had to go.

My big boy toy. columbia AKA Mtd 990

• wrbourget
• Nov 10, 2011

Mistery solved as it turns its a Columbia still not sure on the year.

 

[Ryan313]

Lets get some votes in! Good luck to all nominees! And good luck to the voters who will have to make a decision! Lol.

 

[NUTNDUN]

Let the voting begin.

 

[Ryan313]

7 votes for the first day, not bad for such a tough call. I'm still debating my choice, I think its down to two now, neither are mine.

 

[antiquetractors]

That SIMAR rototiller is just way to cool.

 

[MH81]

Can I vote for all of them?

Wow, this is going to require some serious thought.

 

[Newpaws493]

the variety and background for each is the treasure IMO, choosing one...errrr

Thanks to all entrants for the dedication to this 'functional art'.

 

[1978murray]

that panzer is realy nice and original, HAHA