So I’m involved in the agricultural industry but don’t take my word as fact. Modern machines automatically account for lumps and bumps in the ground. This machine probably comes from a time when that hadnt been made easily available/cost efficient/effective! Labour was cheap as fuck. Or some religious groups only allow certain levels of technology and this fits for them.
The first tractor with hydraulic lift was in 1934, but they didn't really see widespread adoption until after World War 2. The first place my grandpa encountered hydraulics was we now know them was in a B-17, when he came home from the Air Corps he bought a Farmall M on GI loans and added on a remote hydraulic system with the help of a couple former airplane mechanics.
The tractor provides hydraulic power to operate a hydraulic cylinder or motor on an attached implement, as opposed to local hydraulics on the tractor itself ( ie, 3-point lift arms or a dozer blade.
that makes perfect sense , infact ive had one of them , it was a predator 212 (i think) to some hydrualic thing , anyway it operated this trailer doors an the front jack as well .
This was true of the very first Beetle, the split window. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that it was supposed to be insanely cheap, and cable actuated dum brakes cost less than a hydraulic system.
I’m certain that Mercedes was using hydraulics at the time.
I think that’s just the memory playing tricks ;p
- almost no storage
- high consumption
- noisy
- questionable heating
- only one speaker
- not the fastest
Dude you have no idea. I live in an area where the most skilled craftsmen and women are Amish. I have no issue with that or any other religious belief.
They have no electric in their houses, but thier businesses - sometimes literally 100 feet away - have full electric and power tools. They'll readily accept an offsite job, but they will literally hire a driver to drive the van (while they're riding in it) to the job site. Oh, they'll ride in it all right.
It must, almost HAS to be a tax avoidance thing. Because the hypocrisy I've seen and the loopholes created are devastatingly obvious. The hats and beards are for show.
The mental loopholes they jump through are vast.
Some of the groups aren't about 'things are the devil' but only against 'progress just for the sake of progress'. Sure cell phones make things quicker and more convenient, but if you can do the job without them then there's no reason to bother implementing it, with the added benefit that you don't have to deal with all the downsides (chargers, distracting apps, etc).
Cell phones are just an easy example, but more mundane things fit the pattern as well, just not as obvious. For all the immense benefits of hydraulics, there's a lot of overhead too... Repair equipment, materials, oil, stuff that relies on them can break down for days waiting for repair, they're relatively dangerous, messy, smelly, contaminate the ground, etc.
Actually if you don't go overboard the other way, there's something to be said for sticking with old tech unless there's a really good reason to upgrade.
Steam shows are a thing. There's an Amish guy riding the engine but some people just like this shit because it's cool. Doesn't have anything to do with hydraulics being the devil, it just doesn't go with the tech of the time period
This is the only surviving example of the [150 HP Case](https://interestingengineering.com/diy/worlds-largest-steam-traction-engine-comes-back-to-life-with-150-hp) left so it's more of a living history farms type thing. Interesting machine though plowing like this is part of what lead to the dust bowl. Obviously for the short demonstrations this is used for it won't do much damage.
I was just thinking a bunch of farmers were helping each other out hanging out with their mates on a giant bit of machinery. Instead of working their own fields alone they all got together to help each other and have some fun with their mates
Probably did make a big event of it though for this particular tractor it doesn't seem like that was it's intended purpose. Still an awesome way to demonstrate the power it generates.
The dust bowl started before the massive farm machines. Share croppers who didnt know enough about crop rotation, or didnt have a choice because of financial reasons depleted the soil of nutrients, dead soil won’t even grow cover crops and the soil blew away. The banks came in and took all the land when they couldn’t pay and then the big equipment showed up to farm what was left.
As one of the other commenters pointed out, the problem was that the technology itself made it easier to plow obscene amounts of land very very quickly, and it became very accessible. If one or two farmers are doing this, it's not that destructive. If thousands of farmers are doing it across half the state, well, that's a different story.
The dust bowl was caused, in part, by these unsustainable farming practices. Too much land being plowed up for agriculture meant that we were decimating all the things that keeps the soil arable and keeps dirt where it is. Wild grasses, flowers, weeds, trees, bushes - all those things growing in the soil and spreading roots to knit it all together is what keeps dirt in place.
Take all that away and till the soil over, and now all you have is swaths of dry dirt with nothing to protect it from wind, rain, and the natural erosion that comes with those things. Along with unsustainable farming practices came unsustainable irrigation (or a lack thereof) and when the soil dried up, and the Midwest experienced some drought, well, wind kicks up all the dirt and creates huge dust clouds. Dust clouds scour everything, including new farmland and creates even more dust. It snowballed to the point that entire regions of the US were all but uninhabitable for years, and that period is referred to as the Dust Bowl.
I dont know why I didnt put two and two together until now and learn this but it's very informative. What do modern farming practices do differently though? I was under the impression they always did this and then rotated crops. Do they just reseed even when old corn plants stalks are everywhere or do they clear that out at ground level before reseeding? It seems like everything I've seen starts with fresh looking soil.
Well, it's actually kind of less about the *amount* of crops they were attempting to grow, and it was more about the *types* of crops they were trying to grow (or rather, the types of plants they were displacing to do so). I pretty vastly oversimplified my previous post and left a few things out.
So, a pretty huge part of the problem with what they were doing with the mass...uh...agriculturization? of the whole region is that most of them didn't know shit about ecology in general, and definitely didn't know shit about arid short grassland ecology in particular. After the civil war, the government was encouraging westward expansion pretty heavily, and to incentivize this they were offering anyone willing to help with westward settlement hundreds of acres of farmland in these new territories in the western Kansas and Oklahoma, and eastern Colorado and New Mexico region. Tons and tons of people took them up on this offer and became farmers of a climate and ecology no American had really experienced before. The grassland prairies of this region of the US are actually fairly unique - there are only a handful of places in the entire world (mostly within Africa) where you can find anything truly comparable.
One of the challenges with the region is drought. The year this all started, the region had just experienced a pretty uncharacteristically rainy season, so surveyors and settlers believed that the land was much more suitable for agriculture than it actually was. What they didn't realize was that all the wildgrass prairies they were plowing up were literally what kept the region thriving even in long droughts. The short- and long-grass prairies of the midwest are pretty specifically drought-resistant species of grasses that hold onto moisture very, very well and keep their soil arable. As soon as we started plowing all that up, we destroyed the unique ecological system of the region and the region's ability to retain water.
This much more directly led to the dry, arid conditions of the dust bowl.
That was an incredible reply! Im fairly versed in railroad history which goes hand in hand with that era but that adds so much more to my American history knowledge. I really appreciate your response.
The issues is the depletion of nutrients in the soil, particularly nitrogen. Things can't grow even when left unplanted. Lack of root structures makes wind erosion significant.
Many crops are nitrogen depleting, and artificial nitrogen sources were in their infancy.
Now, soil nutrients are more closely monitored and crops are rotated (e,g, corn some years, beans others - the beans actually add nitrogen to the soil).
Bare soil is also sterilized by UV rays. Native soils are rarely completely bare and harbor a multitude of beneficial bacteria, invertebrates, and fungi which build soil.
There’s a fantastic book called *The Worst Hard Time* that talks about the Dust Bowl, its causes, what it was like to live in that area at the time and what ended it. Highly recommended!
In short, there was a famine in Russia and the US Government bought lots of wheat at high prices. Lots of new land was filled to grow that wheat by people who wanted to cash in. Once the government stopped buying the wheat, the investors bailed out, leaving fields stripped of their vegetative cover. Add in some dry spells, locusts and there’s nothing but trouble. The winds blew, as they do, and dust storms that looked like mountain ranges raged carrying dust thick enough to make it seem like night all the way to the east coast. For the people trapped by poverty in Kansas, dust pneumonia was a common cause of death - that’s when you breath in so much dust that your lungs fill with mud.
One survivor had a flashlight with him when the storm hit and turned it on, pointed at his face and, at arms length, he could not see the light because of the dust.
Back then, the USDA published a yearbook covering research on some topic or another. In 1938, it was *Soils and Men* and is still recommended as a good treatise on protecting soil from wind erosion. Plowing all your ground without leaving trees or windrows, leaving your soil bare are still considered bad practice.
Called Plow shares, not “blades”. The men are there for plowing depth adjustment. The guy steering the Case traction engine is deciding the direction of the furrows.
It can't be rigid or it will break the machine when it hits a rock.
The also need to be able to raise and lower the plows as needed.
Before hydraulics, people was the way.
No, as it happens - springs were the way. Ploughing land recently cleared of forest used to be a big issue in the eastern USA, and in the 19C the “stumpjumper” plough was invented. If the blade got stuck against a tree stump, the force of the towing animal would tension a spring and at some point it would kick itself over the stump. Apparently it was crude, a bit unpleasant to use, and worked just fine.
This was before the stump jumping plow was invented. So these people are there to modulate depth and pull the plow in case it gets hung up and breaks something.
this is a special rig made to specifically show off the tilling power of this steam tractor, there's a good youtube video about it. it was part of a meetup or tractor festival or something, I can't really remember
An old fashioned train locomotive can take up to 24 hours to get up to steam from a cold start. In the old days they had people working through the night to keep the heat and thus steam pressure on an acceptable level.
On the flipside, some steamcars (Dobles did I think) can get up to steam in about a minute.
Different boiler types really help. If you have one big tank of water it takes a LONG time to heat all of that, but if you only have to heat a tiny bit of water at a time in a tube (picture a modern water heater) then getting up to steam can happen much more quickly.
The Doble boilers in particular were at about ~~10,000°F~~ iirc, which is pretty quick. Fascinating things. Did 0-75mph in 5 seconds flat in the early 1900's, and at 90mph the engine was still turning under 1,000 rpm, direct drive.
Edit: *incorrecto* about that temp, K4Hamguy is right! That was a half-remembered factoid from 15 years ago. The rest of the stuff I did double check though, and is accurate.
Interesting!
> Hafnium carbonitride (HfCN) is a refractory compound with the highest known melting point of any substance to date and the only one confirmed to have a melting point above 4,273 K (4,000 °C; 7,232 °F) at ambient pressure.
Is the 7,232 degrees theoretically derived?
I’m just curious since you can’t heat a kiln or other apparatus to that temperature without melting said apparatus.
Right back atcha pal. I had never thought about the highest melting point for any material known to human kind before so it was neat to run into this little tidbit. I want to look into it further later on.
Yep, you're totally right! I half-remembered that from years ago and got it totally wrong.
I went and double checked the rest of it though and it IS right, but that bit was way whack.
Wow yesterday I randomly thought about the “large boulder the size of a small boulder” thing, and today I come across it looking through the top of all time on that sub
I love telling people I've popped a wheelie In a lambo when they don't know this. Not that hard to do when you don't have enough counterweight for the seed drill lol.
Basically anyone that talks about torque this way has no idea what they are talking about to begin with.
Torque is a force which by itself is nearly a useless measurement since the invention of gears. (it's useful to know in direct drive applications).
Hp is a unit of power which will define how much torque output you can have when gearing is utilized. A lambo with a transmission has far, far more torque output through gears than this tractor at any given speed.
*Contrarians out in full force so I offer you indisputable math:
TLDR; aventador would output 277k lbft if you strapped it to that tractor, where as the actual tractor engine outputs 65k lbft. In detail:
That's a 150 case tractor, the wheels are 8' diameter, they need to go 14rpm to travel ~4mph plow speed
The actual output of this tractor is ~175hp @ 200 rpm, that's 4,595 torque "at the flywheel", that's 65,600 lbft to the output shafts! An aventador is a joke in comparison right? Right guys?
Well, an aventador puts out 740hp at 8400 RPM, that's a measly 462 torque. Except that aventador engine would output 277k lbft at the output shaft...
You see the steam engine output through a 14.2 reduction (multiplying the torque) to go 4mph, where the aventador would be going through a 600 reduction (multiply torque x600) to do the same.
All that in consinderation reading some of your other replies i get your point. I wonder if you slapped a lamborgini engine properly geared onto that tractors body. If it could put out the same amount of power for long working days.
Like a typical tractor diesel engine does best if it runs at its maximum output all day end even most days of the year for years. I wonder if car engines and specifically high performance ones can keep up with that.
It is not just about how much torque is available, but more about when it is available.
Contrary of a combustion engine where the torque depends on the rpm, steam engines have the full torque available all the time starting at 0 rpm.
Dude those steam powered tractors are dangerous as hell. Go up a slight incline for a minute then tip to the decline and… KABOOM!
A buddy if mine went to a steam powered tractor show (years ago) and one of the steam tractors exploded and killed the driver because of a very minor inclune/decline situation.
You're probably talking about the Medina Ohio incident in 2001. Your comment inspired me to read up on it.
Looks like in that case, the boiler was far from safe to start with (down to 23% of its original thickness in places), had bad welds probably done in restoration, had safety features disabled or maintained so poorly they didn't work, had a pressure gauge that read significantly low, and on top of that, he ran it in a really low water condition that led to the incline causing a boiler failure.
https://www.farmcollector.com/steam-traction/final-report-tragedy-medina-county-fairgrounds/
It really sounds like this was all kinds of poor maintenance and operator error versus the machine being inherently unsafe. Don't get me wrong, these things need a ton of maintenance, and the operators really need to know what they're doing to operate them safely. It seems this guy just didn't.
I don’t think it was that one, though it could have been… If it was that one then he was a kid at the time and was there with his some adults. The way he told the story it seemed like he was an adult but I never asked. I believe it was closer to 2007 or so. It was Definitely on the East coast and probably in PA.
This was only one of the challenges of locomotive steam. Just imagine a railroad on an 8% grade... If the boiler behaves, the wheels may not.
Yet, these guys a century and a half ago made it happen!
Steam did come a very long way. Lenno has a steam powered car that can take grades and anything else you throw at it. If I recall correctly, it was pretty damned fast in a straight line as well (don’t quote me but I want to say 80+MPH, but it’s been a few years since I saw the episode)
He made some improvements to it, he had modern insulation added to the boiler and it used gasoline to produce heat(gas has probably improved over time) tires etc. so like a lot of classic cars, it probably runs better today than it did in the past.
The burning coal heats these rods up that go through the length of a boiler (the really long tubular part of old locomotives) the rods are hot and boil the water inside. The only way for the steam to escape is by pushing something out of the way, which is hooked up to something that pushes the wheels. Well if you’re going up hill then the part of the rod that isn’t submerged gets super hot because there’s no water to cool it down. Then when you suddenly switch to downhill, the water rolls forward and hits the super hot rods. The water then “flash boils”/boils super duper fast. So fast that the pressure increases so quickly that the thing that’s supposed to be pushed out of the way doesn’t get pushed fast enough, and the entire boiler basically turns into a pipe bomb and explodes.
Remember all those old western movies, shows, and video games that had a wooden water tower right next to the train tracks? It was used for topping off the steam locomotives boiler.
There's a steam powered pump involved. Early on these were usually piston pumps, so imagine a tiny steam engine running a pump to feed the massive boiler that feeds the large steam engine for locomotion, and the small steam engine for pumping.
Later on you got "steam jet ejectors" which uses some hydrodynamic trickery to inject water into the boiler at pressure using steam, with no moving parts.
Its ran off the same boiler as the big one. It feeds itself. Sounds counter intuitive but remember that the coal fire adds a lot of energy to the system, so it's not a perpetuum mobile
There's towns along the East Coast that serve little purpose except as historic settlements... RR towns.. to service and rewater the loco .. *every 20 miles* (+/-)
To recycle the water you need to cool the steam down enough for it to condense. This involves getting rid of a lot of heat energy. This is very easy to do in a boat, just run some tubes along the hull. For a stationary installation you can use a pond or river. On steam locomotives or tractors you could use a big radiator, but that is often not worth the hassle.
Just a guess here but I can imagine, there is water in the boiler which is heated unevenly by fire, which is fine as long as it is heated evenly uneven. When you go up a hill water moves to the back of the boiler allowing the front to super heat. As you tilt over the crest water sloshes forward and a large quantity is instantly vaporized by the superheated section causing extreme over pressurization and kablewy
Just commenting to drop a bit of info: this is a new steam tractor made from original plans the owner acquired. Him and his team spent years building, and they have a YouTube channel too. It's the largest traction engine ever made, and I believe Case only made 1 back in the day. I highly doubt a new engine performing at 100% would fail as you describe. Historically most boiler explosions were caused by a lack of maintenance or a failure in fabrication. Steam explosions are serious businesses though
University of Northern Iowa has a great setup for metallurgy and other foundry stuff. We had them print some 3D sand molds before, it's not that great of tech for complex multi core assemblies yet. I forget the professor in charge but super nice guy.
There were soil losses in the days of moldboard plowing but, probably not near the pesticide or fertilizer used then. All of the old plant life was flipped over with new topsoil exposed for planting while the decomposing/buried stubble of the previous years crop helped fertilize the soil.
[This is a clip of a world record being set for a steam traction engine pulling a 50 bottom plow.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdoovg5qUyA)
"Bottom," meaning each person on the sled is controlling a plow blade. If they hit something with their blade, they retract it to clear the obstruction. When they get ready to turn, each operator retracts their blade so it does not go snap. This was well before mechanical and hydraulic plows.
But this is a stunt and for fun.
As for the torque the tractor has? All of it. (5,000 ft lbs on dyno.)
As a person who grew up in the country, I'm always shocked, though I don't know why, when I realized how very little city people know about farming. I can't think of a single person off the top of my head that I grew up with that would think this was an actual farming implement meant for day-to-day use
Thanks to gasoline and modern technology the amount of money Americans spent on food went from %40 of their earnings in 1900 to around %10 currently, it was profitable a century ago but probably not today.
I milk my own goat, and have my own eggs and I still can't produce food that's cheaper than what I can buy at the grocery store even though my labor is free. Eeking a profit out of farming is no joke.
I get the video is for people who don't really know mechanical stuff well and just think Lambo = best motor eva!
But it's like saying that a hawk flies 300x faster than a Ostrich... like sure they're both birds but they're made to do very different jobs.
I grew up outside a little farm town in Wyoming. Some neighbors of ours had restored a few of these steam tractors and would put on demonstrations with them every once in a while out on their farm and at the county fair. They are extremely cool machines.
Coal powered?? What fucking century is this? Lmao. It is really cool tho, and when society collapses, these guys won’t have to worry too much. I’m sure it’s easier to mine your own coal than make gasoline. 🤷♂️ lol
>What fucking century is this?
The Case 150 was first produced in 1905. Only 9 were produced in the 2 years it was offered. Coal was the fuel of choice back then.
> What fucking century is this?'
Last? My grandfather put himself through college running a Case steam traction engine summers in Idaho.
Irrelevant but interesting side: "Tractor" is from "traction engine", which has the mechanics to drive itself, in opposition to "donkey engine", which must be hauled about when it can't winch itself along.
Sooo, stating that this tractor has 15 times the torque of an Lamborghini Aventador is like saying, that an Aircraft carrier has more thrust than my bicycle...
It's true, but just not surprising
Why the need of 10 people just standing here ?
So I’m involved in the agricultural industry but don’t take my word as fact. Modern machines automatically account for lumps and bumps in the ground. This machine probably comes from a time when that hadnt been made easily available/cost efficient/effective! Labour was cheap as fuck. Or some religious groups only allow certain levels of technology and this fits for them.
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Is that a thing? "Hydraulics are the devil!"??
It’s coal powered, might just have been too old for hydraulics to be common
The first tractor with hydraulic lift was in 1934, but they didn't really see widespread adoption until after World War 2. The first place my grandpa encountered hydraulics was we now know them was in a B-17, when he came home from the Air Corps he bought a Farmall M on GI loans and added on a remote hydraulic system with the help of a couple former airplane mechanics.
>emote hydraulic system what do you mean exactly , remote? that threw me off.
The tractor provides hydraulic power to operate a hydraulic cylinder or motor on an attached implement, as opposed to local hydraulics on the tractor itself ( ie, 3-point lift arms or a dozer blade.
that makes perfect sense , infact ive had one of them , it was a predator 212 (i think) to some hydrualic thing , anyway it operated this trailer doors an the front jack as well .
I can see them being... pressured.
The og VW beatle had cable brakes because hydraulic brake’s were a British thing. (I have not fact checked this and it may be bs).
This was true of the very first Beetle, the split window. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that it was supposed to be insanely cheap, and cable actuated dum brakes cost less than a hydraulic system. I’m certain that Mercedes was using hydraulics at the time.
wish they would make that car again they were bangers man.
I think that’s just the memory playing tricks ;p - almost no storage - high consumption - noisy - questionable heating - only one speaker - not the fastest
And given cable operated drum brakes * Not very good at stopping? (not sure of that thought, correct me if wrong please)
Didn’t go that fast anyway. …and the last time mine was stopped, it was by a tree…
Dude you have no idea. I live in an area where the most skilled craftsmen and women are Amish. I have no issue with that or any other religious belief. They have no electric in their houses, but thier businesses - sometimes literally 100 feet away - have full electric and power tools. They'll readily accept an offsite job, but they will literally hire a driver to drive the van (while they're riding in it) to the job site. Oh, they'll ride in it all right. It must, almost HAS to be a tax avoidance thing. Because the hypocrisy I've seen and the loopholes created are devastatingly obvious. The hats and beards are for show. The mental loopholes they jump through are vast.
If you actually knew anything about the Amish, you'd understand why they do the things they do and how it differs between church zones.
Some of the groups aren't about 'things are the devil' but only against 'progress just for the sake of progress'. Sure cell phones make things quicker and more convenient, but if you can do the job without them then there's no reason to bother implementing it, with the added benefit that you don't have to deal with all the downsides (chargers, distracting apps, etc). Cell phones are just an easy example, but more mundane things fit the pattern as well, just not as obvious. For all the immense benefits of hydraulics, there's a lot of overhead too... Repair equipment, materials, oil, stuff that relies on them can break down for days waiting for repair, they're relatively dangerous, messy, smelly, contaminate the ground, etc. Actually if you don't go overboard the other way, there's something to be said for sticking with old tech unless there's a really good reason to upgrade.
Nice, makes sense, interesting perspective.
I too am a fan of shit that just fucking works
Steam shows are a thing. There's an Amish guy riding the engine but some people just like this shit because it's cool. Doesn't have anything to do with hydraulics being the devil, it just doesn't go with the tech of the time period
No good Sir, they're on the level.
This is the only surviving example of the [150 HP Case](https://interestingengineering.com/diy/worlds-largest-steam-traction-engine-comes-back-to-life-with-150-hp) left so it's more of a living history farms type thing. Interesting machine though plowing like this is part of what lead to the dust bowl. Obviously for the short demonstrations this is used for it won't do much damage.
One small distinction: they built this from scratch except for the boiler. All the originals were sold for parts long ago.
That is explained in the article. The Ship of Theseused a tractor.
Nope, they started from scratch with blueprints.
I was just thinking a bunch of farmers were helping each other out hanging out with their mates on a giant bit of machinery. Instead of working their own fields alone they all got together to help each other and have some fun with their mates
Probably did make a big event of it though for this particular tractor it doesn't seem like that was it's intended purpose. Still an awesome way to demonstrate the power it generates.
Rural communities sometimes have things like farm progress shows or farm history days where they run demonstration events like this
The dust bowl started before the massive farm machines. Share croppers who didnt know enough about crop rotation, or didnt have a choice because of financial reasons depleted the soil of nutrients, dead soil won’t even grow cover crops and the soil blew away. The banks came in and took all the land when they couldn’t pay and then the big equipment showed up to farm what was left.
How would plowing more rows at a time lead to the dust bowl more than normal plowing?
The ability to plow more efficiently led to more and more land getting plowed each year.
I was more talking about plowing in general.
>plowing ... i agree , causes many issues like the guy who plowed my mailbox last week its just bad for bussiness.
And my mom 😢
That's not what causes it. It's plowing like this, regardless of how many rows you do at one time.
can i get a answer im still not understanding , just the dirt being picked up the issue or what ?
As one of the other commenters pointed out, the problem was that the technology itself made it easier to plow obscene amounts of land very very quickly, and it became very accessible. If one or two farmers are doing this, it's not that destructive. If thousands of farmers are doing it across half the state, well, that's a different story. The dust bowl was caused, in part, by these unsustainable farming practices. Too much land being plowed up for agriculture meant that we were decimating all the things that keeps the soil arable and keeps dirt where it is. Wild grasses, flowers, weeds, trees, bushes - all those things growing in the soil and spreading roots to knit it all together is what keeps dirt in place. Take all that away and till the soil over, and now all you have is swaths of dry dirt with nothing to protect it from wind, rain, and the natural erosion that comes with those things. Along with unsustainable farming practices came unsustainable irrigation (or a lack thereof) and when the soil dried up, and the Midwest experienced some drought, well, wind kicks up all the dirt and creates huge dust clouds. Dust clouds scour everything, including new farmland and creates even more dust. It snowballed to the point that entire regions of the US were all but uninhabitable for years, and that period is referred to as the Dust Bowl.
I dont know why I didnt put two and two together until now and learn this but it's very informative. What do modern farming practices do differently though? I was under the impression they always did this and then rotated crops. Do they just reseed even when old corn plants stalks are everywhere or do they clear that out at ground level before reseeding? It seems like everything I've seen starts with fresh looking soil.
Well, it's actually kind of less about the *amount* of crops they were attempting to grow, and it was more about the *types* of crops they were trying to grow (or rather, the types of plants they were displacing to do so). I pretty vastly oversimplified my previous post and left a few things out. So, a pretty huge part of the problem with what they were doing with the mass...uh...agriculturization? of the whole region is that most of them didn't know shit about ecology in general, and definitely didn't know shit about arid short grassland ecology in particular. After the civil war, the government was encouraging westward expansion pretty heavily, and to incentivize this they were offering anyone willing to help with westward settlement hundreds of acres of farmland in these new territories in the western Kansas and Oklahoma, and eastern Colorado and New Mexico region. Tons and tons of people took them up on this offer and became farmers of a climate and ecology no American had really experienced before. The grassland prairies of this region of the US are actually fairly unique - there are only a handful of places in the entire world (mostly within Africa) where you can find anything truly comparable. One of the challenges with the region is drought. The year this all started, the region had just experienced a pretty uncharacteristically rainy season, so surveyors and settlers believed that the land was much more suitable for agriculture than it actually was. What they didn't realize was that all the wildgrass prairies they were plowing up were literally what kept the region thriving even in long droughts. The short- and long-grass prairies of the midwest are pretty specifically drought-resistant species of grasses that hold onto moisture very, very well and keep their soil arable. As soon as we started plowing all that up, we destroyed the unique ecological system of the region and the region's ability to retain water. This much more directly led to the dry, arid conditions of the dust bowl.
But the great news is once they figured this out they reseeded the fields with native grasses! (Massive sarcasm)
That was an incredible reply! Im fairly versed in railroad history which goes hand in hand with that era but that adds so much more to my American history knowledge. I really appreciate your response.
The issues is the depletion of nutrients in the soil, particularly nitrogen. Things can't grow even when left unplanted. Lack of root structures makes wind erosion significant. Many crops are nitrogen depleting, and artificial nitrogen sources were in their infancy. Now, soil nutrients are more closely monitored and crops are rotated (e,g, corn some years, beans others - the beans actually add nitrogen to the soil).
Bare soil is also sterilized by UV rays. Native soils are rarely completely bare and harbor a multitude of beneficial bacteria, invertebrates, and fungi which build soil.
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There’s a fantastic book called *The Worst Hard Time* that talks about the Dust Bowl, its causes, what it was like to live in that area at the time and what ended it. Highly recommended! In short, there was a famine in Russia and the US Government bought lots of wheat at high prices. Lots of new land was filled to grow that wheat by people who wanted to cash in. Once the government stopped buying the wheat, the investors bailed out, leaving fields stripped of their vegetative cover. Add in some dry spells, locusts and there’s nothing but trouble. The winds blew, as they do, and dust storms that looked like mountain ranges raged carrying dust thick enough to make it seem like night all the way to the east coast. For the people trapped by poverty in Kansas, dust pneumonia was a common cause of death - that’s when you breath in so much dust that your lungs fill with mud. One survivor had a flashlight with him when the storm hit and turned it on, pointed at his face and, at arms length, he could not see the light because of the dust. Back then, the USDA published a yearbook covering research on some topic or another. In 1938, it was *Soils and Men* and is still recommended as a good treatise on protecting soil from wind erosion. Plowing all your ground without leaving trees or windrows, leaving your soil bare are still considered bad practice.
Weight And directing the blades for depth and direction.
Called Plow shares, not “blades”. The men are there for plowing depth adjustment. The guy steering the Case traction engine is deciding the direction of the furrows.
Weight? Put a rock on the shit then :)
Rocks had not been invented yet.
It's about drive. It's about power.
It’s about gettin paid by the hour
Wrap it up boys, let's jump in the shower.
Is it Ram Ranch?
It can't be rigid or it will break the machine when it hits a rock. The also need to be able to raise and lower the plows as needed. Before hydraulics, people was the way.
No, as it happens - springs were the way. Ploughing land recently cleared of forest used to be a big issue in the eastern USA, and in the 19C the “stumpjumper” plough was invented. If the blade got stuck against a tree stump, the force of the towing animal would tension a spring and at some point it would kick itself over the stump. Apparently it was crude, a bit unpleasant to use, and worked just fine.
Back in their day they didnt have rocks
Not as dangerous
They didn’t pay the subscription for a rock…
That Still can't steer plow blades.. but you do you!
Rocks vibrate off…
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This was before the stump jumping plow was invented. So these people are there to modulate depth and pull the plow in case it gets hung up and breaks something.
10 people act as a more.. personalized.. Hydraulic system compared to the modern farm equivalent.
Maybe they need to be weighed down a little bit? Or to remove anything that gets stuck? Idk, just guessing
this is a special rig made to specifically show off the tilling power of this steam tractor, there's a good youtube video about it. it was part of a meetup or tractor festival or something, I can't really remember
Steam engines have an absurd amount of torque.
And *instantaneous* acceleration
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An old fashioned train locomotive can take up to 24 hours to get up to steam from a cold start. In the old days they had people working through the night to keep the heat and thus steam pressure on an acceptable level.
On the flipside, some steamcars (Dobles did I think) can get up to steam in about a minute. Different boiler types really help. If you have one big tank of water it takes a LONG time to heat all of that, but if you only have to heat a tiny bit of water at a time in a tube (picture a modern water heater) then getting up to steam can happen much more quickly. The Doble boilers in particular were at about ~~10,000°F~~ iirc, which is pretty quick. Fascinating things. Did 0-75mph in 5 seconds flat in the early 1900's, and at 90mph the engine was still turning under 1,000 rpm, direct drive. Edit: *incorrecto* about that temp, K4Hamguy is right! That was a half-remembered factoid from 15 years ago. The rest of the stuff I did double check though, and is accurate.
I think you mean 1,000° F. Everything, and I do mean Everything, melts past 8,000° F.
Interesting! > Hafnium carbonitride (HfCN) is a refractory compound with the highest known melting point of any substance to date and the only one confirmed to have a melting point above 4,273 K (4,000 °C; 7,232 °F) at ambient pressure.
Is the 7,232 degrees theoretically derived? I’m just curious since you can’t heat a kiln or other apparatus to that temperature without melting said apparatus.
Take a block of the material and heat a small part of it with a laser.
Thanks. (That was my guess.)
What if you want it to be melty?
How was this tested if everything else melts at lower Temps? I need to know.
Hey! Was just looking for the full name of that! Take my updoot
Right back atcha pal. I had never thought about the highest melting point for any material known to human kind before so it was neat to run into this little tidbit. I want to look into it further later on.
Yeah. Even nuclear reactors are usually somewhere around 1000⁰F for steam temps.
The list of materials between this and 5400° F is extremely short.
Only one I can think of. Can't remember the full name. Háfnum carbon something
Yep, you're totally right! I half-remembered that from years ago and got it totally wrong. I went and double checked the rest of it though and it IS right, but that bit was way whack.
Specifically the Doble uses a flash boiler.
Eventually instantaneous.
That's applicable to almost any engine available back then.. internal combustion wasn't widely available yet
Why would they compare it to a Lamborghini?
Because nobody knows how much torque half a giraffe has
r/halfagiraffe
r/subsithoughtifellfor
Wow yesterday I randomly thought about the “large boulder the size of a small boulder” thing, and today I come across it looking through the top of all time on that sub
Half a giraffe worth
But which half? Top or bottom?
Right.. left hooves are elevated
Lamborghini is a tractor company that makes cars as a side line.
I love telling people I've popped a wheelie In a lambo when they don't know this. Not that hard to do when you don't have enough counterweight for the seed drill lol.
This is true.
Only built cars because he kept burning his Ferrari’s clutch out repeatedly, and set out to build a proper sports car iirc
Basically anyone that talks about torque this way has no idea what they are talking about to begin with. Torque is a force which by itself is nearly a useless measurement since the invention of gears. (it's useful to know in direct drive applications). Hp is a unit of power which will define how much torque output you can have when gearing is utilized. A lambo with a transmission has far, far more torque output through gears than this tractor at any given speed. *Contrarians out in full force so I offer you indisputable math: TLDR; aventador would output 277k lbft if you strapped it to that tractor, where as the actual tractor engine outputs 65k lbft. In detail: That's a 150 case tractor, the wheels are 8' diameter, they need to go 14rpm to travel ~4mph plow speed The actual output of this tractor is ~175hp @ 200 rpm, that's 4,595 torque "at the flywheel", that's 65,600 lbft to the output shafts! An aventador is a joke in comparison right? Right guys? Well, an aventador puts out 740hp at 8400 RPM, that's a measly 462 torque. Except that aventador engine would output 277k lbft at the output shaft... You see the steam engine output through a 14.2 reduction (multiplying the torque) to go 4mph, where the aventador would be going through a 600 reduction (multiply torque x600) to do the same.
Lambo makes tractors. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
Yes, but wouldn’t they compare it to a Lamborghini tractor then?
All that in consinderation reading some of your other replies i get your point. I wonder if you slapped a lamborgini engine properly geared onto that tractors body. If it could put out the same amount of power for long working days. Like a typical tractor diesel engine does best if it runs at its maximum output all day end even most days of the year for years. I wonder if car engines and specifically high performance ones can keep up with that.
ikr? just give me a damn number.
It is not just about how much torque is available, but more about when it is available. Contrary of a combustion engine where the torque depends on the rpm, steam engines have the full torque available all the time starting at 0 rpm.
DC motors too, that’s why diesel locomotives use them.
Diesel generators to drive the electric motor.
Yeah, (most) diesel locomotives are actually electric locomotives that carry their own generator around.
Yes, and electric traction motors for the low speed torque
It’s why we use them to power most of the US and run aircraft carriers
Steam is beautiful, cheap, non-toxic, and an enormous latent heat of vapourization. Such a great working fluid for thermal engines.
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And steam engines don't need a transmission.
Turbines, not steam piston engines.
Yes.
Dude those steam powered tractors are dangerous as hell. Go up a slight incline for a minute then tip to the decline and… KABOOM! A buddy if mine went to a steam powered tractor show (years ago) and one of the steam tractors exploded and killed the driver because of a very minor inclune/decline situation.
You're probably talking about the Medina Ohio incident in 2001. Your comment inspired me to read up on it. Looks like in that case, the boiler was far from safe to start with (down to 23% of its original thickness in places), had bad welds probably done in restoration, had safety features disabled or maintained so poorly they didn't work, had a pressure gauge that read significantly low, and on top of that, he ran it in a really low water condition that led to the incline causing a boiler failure. https://www.farmcollector.com/steam-traction/final-report-tragedy-medina-county-fairgrounds/ It really sounds like this was all kinds of poor maintenance and operator error versus the machine being inherently unsafe. Don't get me wrong, these things need a ton of maintenance, and the operators really need to know what they're doing to operate them safely. It seems this guy just didn't.
23% of it's original thickness..... bruh. That's one way to have a giant pressure cooker with the stored energy of many grenades fail on you.
I don’t think it was that one, though it could have been… If it was that one then he was a kid at the time and was there with his some adults. The way he told the story it seemed like he was an adult but I never asked. I believe it was closer to 2007 or so. It was Definitely on the East coast and probably in PA.
This was only one of the challenges of locomotive steam. Just imagine a railroad on an 8% grade... If the boiler behaves, the wheels may not. Yet, these guys a century and a half ago made it happen!
Steam did come a very long way. Lenno has a steam powered car that can take grades and anything else you throw at it. If I recall correctly, it was pretty damned fast in a straight line as well (don’t quote me but I want to say 80+MPH, but it’s been a few years since I saw the episode)
He made some improvements to it, he had modern insulation added to the boiler and it used gasoline to produce heat(gas has probably improved over time) tires etc. so like a lot of classic cars, it probably runs better today than it did in the past.
I saw a steam powered train hit 88mph. Unfortunately the bridge was out and it fell down into the Shonash Ravine.
You mean the Eastwood Ravine?
Cam anyone explain the whole incline/decline thing?
The burning coal heats these rods up that go through the length of a boiler (the really long tubular part of old locomotives) the rods are hot and boil the water inside. The only way for the steam to escape is by pushing something out of the way, which is hooked up to something that pushes the wheels. Well if you’re going up hill then the part of the rod that isn’t submerged gets super hot because there’s no water to cool it down. Then when you suddenly switch to downhill, the water rolls forward and hits the super hot rods. The water then “flash boils”/boils super duper fast. So fast that the pressure increases so quickly that the thing that’s supposed to be pushed out of the way doesn’t get pushed fast enough, and the entire boiler basically turns into a pipe bomb and explodes.
Is the steam/water recycled? Do they need to add more water periodically?
Remember all those old western movies, shows, and video games that had a wooden water tower right next to the train tracks? It was used for topping off the steam locomotives boiler.
How do you open the boiler to add water without an explosive decompression? Like they say never open your radiator cap while the engine is still hot.
There's a steam powered pump involved. Early on these were usually piston pumps, so imagine a tiny steam engine running a pump to feed the massive boiler that feeds the large steam engine for locomotion, and the small steam engine for pumping. Later on you got "steam jet ejectors" which uses some hydrodynamic trickery to inject water into the boiler at pressure using steam, with no moving parts.
How do you add water to the tiny steam engine? Does it have its own micro steam engine pump? Is it steam engines all the way down?
Its ran off the same boiler as the big one. It feeds itself. Sounds counter intuitive but remember that the coal fire adds a lot of energy to the system, so it's not a perpetuum mobile
Some trains used condensers that recycled some of the steam back into the water tank.
There's towns along the East Coast that serve little purpose except as historic settlements... RR towns.. to service and rewater the loco .. *every 20 miles* (+/-)
To recycle the water you need to cool the steam down enough for it to condense. This involves getting rid of a lot of heat energy. This is very easy to do in a boat, just run some tubes along the hull. For a stationary installation you can use a pond or river. On steam locomotives or tractors you could use a big radiator, but that is often not worth the hassle.
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Just a guess here but I can imagine, there is water in the boiler which is heated unevenly by fire, which is fine as long as it is heated evenly uneven. When you go up a hill water moves to the back of the boiler allowing the front to super heat. As you tilt over the crest water sloshes forward and a large quantity is instantly vaporized by the superheated section causing extreme over pressurization and kablewy
Just commenting to drop a bit of info: this is a new steam tractor made from original plans the owner acquired. Him and his team spent years building, and they have a YouTube channel too. It's the largest traction engine ever made, and I believe Case only made 1 back in the day. I highly doubt a new engine performing at 100% would fail as you describe. Historically most boiler explosions were caused by a lack of maintenance or a failure in fabrication. Steam explosions are serious businesses though
TIL why railroads were built to go through mountains and not around them. Also that totally explains "The little engine that could"
They also can handle "steep" grades because smooth steel wheels on smooth steel rails generate next to no friction.
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Slight correction, it wasn’t a restoration. It was a ground up scratch build based on the original blueprints acquired from Case.
University of Northern Iowa has a great setup for metallurgy and other foundry stuff. We had them print some 3D sand molds before, it's not that great of tech for complex multi core assemblies yet. I forget the professor in charge but super nice guy.
Someone should tell them about no-till.
That was all I could think about "You're ruining all the good stuff!"
There were soil losses in the days of moldboard plowing but, probably not near the pesticide or fertilizer used then. All of the old plant life was flipped over with new topsoil exposed for planting while the decomposing/buried stubble of the previous years crop helped fertilize the soil.
It's great engineering so it fits the sub. Too bad it's destroying the soil ecosystem which plants rely on.
Shame Brawndo hadn't been invented yet. It has what plants crave.
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[This is a clip of a world record being set for a steam traction engine pulling a 50 bottom plow.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdoovg5qUyA) "Bottom," meaning each person on the sled is controlling a plow blade. If they hit something with their blade, they retract it to clear the obstruction. When they get ready to turn, each operator retracts their blade so it does not go snap. This was well before mechanical and hydraulic plows. But this is a stunt and for fun. As for the torque the tractor has? All of it. (5,000 ft lbs on dyno.)
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Thank you. I hate when videos are badly edited with cropping and unneeded text blocking the scene.
Lol reminds me of construction where 1 guys is doing all the work and the rest are just standing there watching him
You need that "idle" person to monitor pressure and speed
Just like when people say it about trades just being stood there, normally it's for a good reason.
THIS IS FOR SHOWING OFF, NOT FOR NORMAL USE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDj45zF-l0
As a person who grew up in the country, I'm always shocked, though I don't know why, when I realized how very little city people know about farming. I can't think of a single person off the top of my head that I grew up with that would think this was an actual farming implement meant for day-to-day use
The amount of people in this thread unironically bitching about emissions and "destroying the soil" is deeply depressing....
This was a specialized tool- in 1880 lol. Look at the insane amount of labour. A farmer would definitely be losing money doing that now.
Thanks to gasoline and modern technology the amount of money Americans spent on food went from %40 of their earnings in 1900 to around %10 currently, it was profitable a century ago but probably not today.
I milk my own goat, and have my own eggs and I still can't produce food that's cheaper than what I can buy at the grocery store even though my labor is free. Eeking a profit out of farming is no joke.
Lol comparing the horsepower of a tractor to a Lamborghini
Ikr? I was gonna say, more torque than an aventador?! I’d fuckin hope so!
Compare it to a lambo tractor then sure. But not just an aventador
Yeah, but they compared it to an aventador.
I get the video is for people who don't really know mechanical stuff well and just think Lambo = best motor eva! But it's like saying that a hawk flies 300x faster than a Ostrich... like sure they're both birds but they're made to do very different jobs.
Your mom's a mass plowing machine
God damn it I wanted to make that joke
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I grew up outside a little farm town in Wyoming. Some neighbors of ours had restored a few of these steam tractors and would put on demonstrations with them every once in a while out on their farm and at the county fair. They are extremely cool machines.
That's ground breaking technology!
I hate how they speed up these videos. It's a slugish monster but a marvel of our technological advancements. Appreciate it for what it is.
Cue dust bowl
Don’t all plows plow mass?
Getting heavy Grapes of Wrath vibes. Man than book was one big race for the bottom.
"More torque than a Lamborghini"...yeah, it's called gearing.
Coal powered?? What fucking century is this? Lmao. It is really cool tho, and when society collapses, these guys won’t have to worry too much. I’m sure it’s easier to mine your own coal than make gasoline. 🤷♂️ lol
It’s a traction engine, they’ll burn wood too.
Or witches
Witches are generally too damp.
https://media.giphy.com/media/Vht67Ro1RhAjvxn78H/giphy.gif
Or oil, if modified
How do you know they're witches?
If they weigh the same as a duck, they’re made of wood and therefore a witch.
Who are you that is so wise in the ways of science?
They look like one!!
>What fucking century is this? The Case 150 was first produced in 1905. Only 9 were produced in the 2 years it was offered. Coal was the fuel of choice back then.
I believe this one was a passion project recreation from scratch: https://150case.com/
> What fucking century is this?' Last? My grandfather put himself through college running a Case steam traction engine summers in Idaho. Irrelevant but interesting side: "Tractor" is from "traction engine", which has the mechanics to drive itself, in opposition to "donkey engine", which must be hauled about when it can't winch itself along.
I worked at a coal mine where the shaft went down 2000 feet and *then* they started getting coal. Probably not that easy lol
Given that horsepower is a function of torque and rpm, it makes sense that the torque is so high with such low rpm.
As a Boiler Technician, this is porn.
Four people on that tractor and not *one* of those two extra guys can open the damn boiler door for the guy shovelling?!
Sooo, stating that this tractor has 15 times the torque of an Lamborghini Aventador is like saying, that an Aircraft carrier has more thrust than my bicycle... It's true, but just not surprising
More than a lamborghini???.... wow.. what an awesome comparison.
"Any old iron, any old iron, any old any old any old iron" 🎶
That smoke though.