Choosing And Using A Tractor

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Scraper blades (Fig. 8) are ordinarily mounted behind the tractor, although front-mounted blades are available for some makes and models. They're most often used for plowing snow, although they also work well for scraping and smoothing gravel roads or driveways. If you reverse the blade, the implement can be used to backfill holes or trenches . . . if not too much soil needs to be moved at once. When buying a scraper blade, look for one with a replaceable carbon-steel wear strip where the edge of the blade meets the ground. A new six-foot scraper blade goes for around $200, while a used one can often be had for half that price.

Logging winches for farm tractors have become common in this country only within the past few years, but in Scandinavia, where most of them are manufactured, they've been in general use for decades. The winch fits in the three-point hitch, as shown in Fig. 9, and is driven by the PTO shaft. With the winch in place, the tractor is taken to within the cable's length—typically 120 to 200 feet—of the felled trees that are to be skidded out of the woodlot. The cable is pulled out by hand and the logs are fastened to it with short choker chains and special sliding fittings. The logs are then winched in, lifted at the tractor end, and dragged off to the yarding area.

Although a winch is costly—it goes for $1,200 to $1,600 new and is a recent enough development to be scarce on the used market—it's a superb tool for the woodlot owner who wants to do some selective cutting with a minimum of damage to the residual stand. And if it enables you to harvest timber that would otherwise simply fall down and rot, the winch can pay for itself with gratifying speed.

Safety

Some aspects of operating a tractor are easily learned by experience. When you first use a disc harrow, for instance, you may have trouble getting it to bite into the soil evenly-but with practice, you'll soon learn to manage the hydraulic draft control to best advantage. Lower it too far, and you'll find that the harrow leans forward and rides on the front gangs alone, the rear ones lifting free of the soil and doing no work. Don't lower it far enough, and the discs will merely scuff the surface of the soil, rather than slicing deeply into it as they should. Common sense, a willingness to ask questions of those with more experience than yourself, and a certain amount of trial and error will teach you most of what you need to know in short order—and teach it to you more effectively than anything you're likely to read.

Safety is another story. A trial-and-error approach here is lunacy, because the consequences of a single error can be so grave that you'll never have a chance to learn what you did wrong. Some of the hazards involved in operating a tractor, of course, are the same as those that go with handling any motor vehicle. Others, however, are less obvious and deserve special mention.

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