[oldE]

WD, Your story about the Allis Chalmers sitting up reminded me of this.
Growing up on the farm, Dad had two Massey Ferguson 35 diesels. In addition to all the other equipment, there was a Massey brush cutter. This machine got used hard. I remember walking into our shop one day and noting the snapped off final drive of the machine sitting on the bench. I would hazard a guess the blade encountered a rock or a chunk of tree with an attitude and the shaft snapped like a carrot.
The shaft wasn't the only part which failed to withstand the pounding of chopping down alder bushes. Eventually the side skirts were beaten out. "No problem!" Said a welder friend of my Dad's. He fabricated new side plates from heavier guage steel. Well eventually the top deck needed the same treatment, then the strut for the tail wheel and finally the hitch to attach the whole (now over built) shebang to the poor little Massey.
I remained quite unaware of the effect of all these modifications until one afternoon when my father suggested I should take the tractor and bush cutter to the field by the river and cut the grasses and weeds growing there.
No problem, thought I as I climbed aboard and fired up the old Massey. Into gear give it a little throttle and ease out the clutch and... Sweet Dear Lord! The front of the old tractor pointed to the sky and refused to come down.. I wasted little time getting the clutch back in but had to lower the cutter to convince the front wheels they really did belong on the ground.
The trip to the field, the whole process of cutting grass and weeds and return to the yard were all accomplished by never taking the weight of the implement on the three point hitch.
Speaking with Dad about my experience he allowed he should have warned me about the effect of the weight of the modifications, but since they had been effected over several years, he just adapted to each one as the machine got heavier.
Years later, we were reminiscing about the work he had done with the machine and he confessed to a predicament he got into while mowing a steep hill.. part way up the hill was a fire break and each time he went up the hill and went over this feature, the front end of the tractor would bounce up. As the hill got more steep, the 'hang time ' increased and eventually the front end refused to come down at all. The tractor sat there with its rear wheels slowly turning but would not climb up the fire break. My father said he knew it couldn't go over backwards as the hitch was strong enough to support the tractor. His solution to the problem was to shift quickly into reverse, back down the hill and finish that part of the slope by mowing up elsewhere and mowing down that section.
He confessed he had never told my mother.

Best
Les