Athens Disk Tiller

That is a disc tiller. Still a great find at that. HTH Tracy Martin

Disc tiller all of the discs are on one shaft

Edited by DonDittmar - 01 Nov 2010 at 10:43am

It is a Lilliston.  My grandfather had that exact one for cultivating his produce crops. He died a few years ago and it likely went to the highest bidding scraphound at his sale.

The tiller looks to be in decent shape.  Many of them are missing the scrapers, or they have been worn out.  Areas to look out for include looking over the castings for cracks and broken pieces (particularly on and around the lift gearbox), and also the disc shaft bearings.  In my opinion, the Athens castings of that time period were not of the best quality.  The iron is of fairly poor quality and has low tensile strength (which they made up for by using plenty of it) and is easily broken by carelessness.  The lift system is "unconventional" and if the springs inside aren't in good shape it can give trouble. Old dried grease will also cause problems, but ever since I cleaned mine out and installed new springs I have had no trouble.  My tiller is a four disc model, but I believe it uses the same spindle bearings as the six disc, so I should warn you that if you have to replace the tapered roller bearings, they are a funny (BIG) old size that has become very expensive.  I was quoted $300 plus for new bearings, so I turned out some sleeves and adapted some more modern but equally rated bearings for about half that money.  With new felt seals and discs, it now works great.  If you haven't used one in the field before, they can be a challenge to adjust properly in hard ground, but they can be adjusted to work very well.  Rarity seems to be a local thing with tillers.  They are not common in many areas, probably because of prevailing soil types.  If you really wanted one and it wasn't too far from home, it might be worth a few hundred dollars just for novelty value.