Sunday, May 22, 2011

Hillbilly Engineering...

We went to town yesterday for some food and hardware.  Driving back toward the outskirts, I yelled "Stop the car!"


It's a 1939 (mumblemumble) agricultural tractor, that's obviously seen a lot of turnip rows since it left the inside of the factory...


And somebody decided to retrofit it with a cute little backhoe attachment, the likes of which hadn't even been invented before the tractor's manufacturer went belly-up.


Somehow jamming the output shaft of the tractor's PTO into the input of the backhoe's hydraulic pump. As far as I can tell, it works. Sorta.

The owner must like it, too. He wants $6000 for it, which is almost what M paid for Gulchendiggensmoothen - a much larger, more powerful and better thought-out kludge.

2 comments:

Pat H. said...

Sounds like the owner is aiming for the collector market, too bad that tractor would have to have four or five thousand spend on it to break the threshold in the collector field.

Big Wooly said...

He'd be better off splitting them back up. The backhoe attachment would be interesting to anyone with a tractor, the tractor itself is a distraction. This is one time where the sum of the parts is less than the total.