4-WD Articulated "Chore Tractor"

4-WD Articulated "Chore Tractor" TRACTORS Made-It-Myself 30-1-17 Albert Collins, Port Elgin, Ontario, built a 3-wheeled, 2-WD chore tractor that rides on 15-in. wheels and has a 24 1/2 by 22-in. bed on back. The "Little Red Horse," as he calls it, is powered by a 5 hp Briggs & Stratton engine and has the 4-speed transmission off a Volkswagen Rabbit front wheel drive car. The engine belt-drives a jackshaft that chain-drives the car's transaxle. A driveshaft extends from the transaxle to the pinion shaft on the rear end off a pickup, which was narrowed to about 4 ft. The tractor doesn't have a steering wheel. Instead, homemade handlebars fit onto a special fork he made out of the suspension strut off an old Ford Tempo. The rig is equipped with a hand-operated brake and gearshift lever. "It has a lot of pulling power and uses very little gas," says Collins. "I built it for my neighbor, Jackie Stevenson, who has a cow-calf operation. She likes it so much that she says she'll never sell it, even though people have offered to buy it from her. She uses it for hauling feed to her cattle, for hauling fencing supplies, and for hauling garbage cans to the end of her long driveway. She also uses it for hauling wood from her shed to her house in a 4 by 8-ft., 2-wheeled trailer that I also built for her. "The bed on back of the tractor is made from sheet metal and has a hinged, wooden tailgate that can be laid down flat." A barbed wire unroller mounts on brackets that fit inside lengths of vertical sq. tubing at the back corners of the bed. The wire unroller was made by bolting a pair of disk blades to a shaft that runs through the wire roll. "It makes fencing a lot easier and a job that's almost fun," notes Collins. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Albert Collins, Rt. 1, Port Elgin, Ontario, Canada N0H 2C5 (ph 519 389-5044).

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