History of Ford and Deere

From the engineer that was in charge, on IPTV.
http://www.iptv.org/mtom/story.cfm/feature/626

From 9N to 4020.

Gerald J.

That was very good

Nice.  Thanks for posting.

Very cool. New piece of information to tuck away. Everytime I see tractors lined up outside the factory, I want to be there walking through them. Just to see that many new tractors at once. 

The world just lost a great american a real mechanical genuis

There was a guy on one of those Farm Ag shows that was a mechanical genius. Never went to school though and he made his own equipment and such. Common Sense can take you far.

Harold Brock, Waterloo, Iowa: I was holding it up, wouldn’t approve it and finally they came to me and said, we want to put it in production and I said, well, you better get yourself a new chief engineer and they did. When I went to Deere a new generation of tractors, they said well Ford is going to come out with a power shift transmission and we won’t have one on our tractor. I said, well don’t worry about it, it won’t work and so I said, we’ll design a power shift transmission that really works.”

What I read from Brock was that the SOS  concept wasn't bad just that it wasn't built strong enough to be reliable. So at Deere, he made sure the PS was strong enough. Best I can tell, both of the Deere new generation transmission were tough and long lived, but the PS broke less often. A neighbor farmed with PS tractors from about 1970 to about 2002, and never broke one. I know the SR is easly destroyed if you tow one with it not in the TOW shifter position. The top shaft spins fast without lubrication and gets welded into a lump. Both transmissions are compact with 8 forward and 2 or 3 reverse in a package many makers used for one of two transmissions.

8 forward was a lot more than the previous tractors of 3 or 4 forward and 1 reverse. The earliest 4010 had 3 reverse, but the third reverse was fast and easily broken if loaded too much. The transmission through the end of 4020 SR actually had 8 forward and 4 reverse, but the '20 locked out the two faster reverse gears in the shift linkage because the gears couldn't handle the load and 20 mph in reverse might not be safe or all that useful.

I didn't find while farming row crops that I lacked available gears in the 4020, nor in my 1968 MF-135 with 12 speeds forward except maybe a real crawler gear about 1/2 mph at PTO engine speed. Both tractors had gear pairs that could be shifted while moving, so it was quite practical to start a load on the road and then at about 16 mph, shift to the top gear to get on up to 22 mph. Though one trip to the elevator with 30,000 pounds of corn and wagons behind the 4020 I could only get it up to 16 mph. I didn't repeat that trip with that much load.

Gerald J.

   Gerald, I will have to disagree. I've ran several 4020 Deeres for different farmers and the only one that was a powershift had a permanantly mounted hyd. post pounder. Everybody said the powershift could not handle tillage work. That included two longtime Deere service managers.

The guys I went to mechanics school with that were and some still are Deere mechanics have all told me that the PS transmission on the 20 series wasn't as reliable as the SR and would grenade once in a while when used in heavy tillage. 8 speeds just isn't enough for a big tractor built in the 1970s to me.