Well I have been at it again working on the customizing the old farm equipment to be more useful!
About 4 years ago we picked up this old Farmall W450 on a ‘if you can get it running you can have it’ deal a few miles from the farm which of course took me about two hours to get it running and driving well enough to get home.
Since then I scrapped out the old loader system and got a better one plus this year it was further modified to become our first backhoe tractor!
The wife and I are working, mostly just I, on building a new house and with all the oil field construction plus last year’s big flood the rates of contractors have gone up so high a person is honestly better off just buying their own equipment to do any work themselves.
I picked up a new Case MBX 1114 backhoe a month ago on a trade for work and parts deal and refitted it to the old W450 farm tractor so that I could do my own trenching and sewer work opposed to paying to have it done.
I did run into a few bugs at first being the modern backhoe needed a 12 GPM 2500 PSI hydraulic power source. At first I ran it off the original PTO pump which came with the tractor but unfortunately couldn’t handle the pressure anymore and blew its seals out.
After that I switched it out to a brand new one I picked up on eBay which worked great for about 20 minutes until the 6 gallon hydraulic reservoir started to overheat. From there I redesigned the whole system to use the tractors main transmission case as the hydraulic reservoir which holds around 12 gallons of fluid plus has about 20 times the surface area of the old tank system.
After that it has been working good but after about 2 -3 hours of solid digging the whole tractor does get rather hot to be on!
So far I have dug most of the large drain field pit for the new sewer where the old trailer is being moved to and the water line trench going down there as well, the new house is going where the old trailer sits and the old trailer is moving about 150 feet down the yard in to an area that was old pasture that never got used much.
Both digging events took around 5 hours and just over 10 gallons of gas total which is not bad at all for this 50 year old farm tractor as the base!
What I started with,
View attachment 65588
What it is now.
View attachment 65589
Some digging,
View attachment 65590
Digging down the hill was interesting.
View attachment 65591
The sewer drain field pit
View attachment 65592
About 4 years ago we picked up this old Farmall W450 on a ‘if you can get it running you can have it’ deal a few miles from the farm which of course took me about two hours to get it running and driving well enough to get home.
Since then I scrapped out the old loader system and got a better one plus this year it was further modified to become our first backhoe tractor!
The wife and I are working, mostly just I, on building a new house and with all the oil field construction plus last year’s big flood the rates of contractors have gone up so high a person is honestly better off just buying their own equipment to do any work themselves.
I picked up a new Case MBX 1114 backhoe a month ago on a trade for work and parts deal and refitted it to the old W450 farm tractor so that I could do my own trenching and sewer work opposed to paying to have it done.
I did run into a few bugs at first being the modern backhoe needed a 12 GPM 2500 PSI hydraulic power source. At first I ran it off the original PTO pump which came with the tractor but unfortunately couldn’t handle the pressure anymore and blew its seals out.
After that I switched it out to a brand new one I picked up on eBay which worked great for about 20 minutes until the 6 gallon hydraulic reservoir started to overheat. From there I redesigned the whole system to use the tractors main transmission case as the hydraulic reservoir which holds around 12 gallons of fluid plus has about 20 times the surface area of the old tank system.
After that it has been working good but after about 2 -3 hours of solid digging the whole tractor does get rather hot to be on!
So far I have dug most of the large drain field pit for the new sewer where the old trailer is being moved to and the water line trench going down there as well, the new house is going where the old trailer sits and the old trailer is moving about 150 feet down the yard in to an area that was old pasture that never got used much.
Both digging events took around 5 hours and just over 10 gallons of gas total which is not bad at all for this 50 year old farm tractor as the base!
What I started with,
View attachment 65588
What it is now.
View attachment 65589
Some digging,
View attachment 65590
Digging down the hill was interesting.
View attachment 65591
The sewer drain field pit
View attachment 65592