kojak

Hey guys I have an option to buy these 2 models, a TW25 and a Valmet and snow plough. I haven't bought any models since the early 80's and want to get started again but have no idea of values or what they might be worth. They are both boxed and in mint condition.

Yep its that time alright...just watching the end of a tv program... as well reading the forum during the ads. Gotta love google earth

Live in Gadansk is brillant....love Gilmour. A link for video footage of the show.... http://www.davidgilmour.com/gdansk/index.html

Yeah its a great experience would recommend it to anyone...getting paid to see australia Heard of harvest haul, we had a few blokes with us for a few weeks who worked for them previously and weren't to happy with money and travelling accomadation....how did you find them? We'd work 20 or more hrs a day 7 days a week for 4 months without a break unless you were lucky and it rained for a day or two. I much preferred the driving the combines...a lot more to concentrate on watching for sticks etc the seeding and tractor work bored the crap out me after the novelty of the gig gear wore off. Especially in the north NSW plains where everything is flat as far as the eye could see. Love down the south, nicer scenery and qld was nice too except for the all contour banks in the paddocks which gave me the s**ts.

That pic with the ball is similar to the scrub we cleared. Nice pics of the dozer catcom3....seen lots of big dozers but never a ripper like that.

The photos were taken in various places in NSW and Qld, we were contracting so we moved around quite a bit. At harvest we'd start up north central qld above a town called Emerald and zig zag all the way down to the South Australian border. The harvest normally starts up north at the end of Aug and finishes down south around xmas or shortly after. Then the combines would be driven back up to Qld to start harvesting sorghum. This where the 80ft seeder photos were taken......google earth says this was taken in nov 2006 well thats wrong because the fields are green which means its winter, I was harvesting there at that time oct to nov. Plus a lot of the field layouts have changed with roads being ploughed to make bigger fields..more scrub has being cleared...dams have been refilled...this was done over 2 to 3 years before then...... From the road above the yard the property extends south swelling out east and west. All those roads you see are private roads. lat.. 29° 3'28.31"S long...149°10'48.25"E the fields you see here have all been knocked into one now... lat 29° 7'52.09"S long 149° 6'8.65"E Did a lot of work all around this area in prob 300km radius, sowing harvesting etc... Will find some more places over the weekend.

A beeline gps which are very expensive, I much prefered the trimble system which were a lot cheaper....a lot more user friendly and better displays with touch screens.

Y'all didn't think I was serious did ya ;D When direct drilling the rig is set up so as to place the seed between the stubble of last years crop, so you gotta have gps. Apart from the cost efficiency lots of farmers use tramlining so the tractors, spray rigs and combines all travel on the same tracks. Row spacings on dry broadacre can be very wide, these were at 6in but I've sowed wheat at 12in spacings in Qld. Before gps, in large paddocks they sowed from the headland in, going round in circles 'til they reached the middle. Example of sowing between last years rows and row spacing. The rig is a little 40ft gason rig pulled with a Case 395.

Setting up two rigs with seed carts ready for sowing.

This was taken outside the workshop before fitting the gas application system.

We didn't take this baby on public roads as it was too wide even when folded. It was only used on the property and even then it had to be taken cross country sometimes too avoid a few narrow bridges on roads over bore drains. When transporting it had to be driven very slowly about 8kms 9 max because there's a lot of weight hanging in mid air.

A lightning strike in north west NSW as a big storm is about to blow over. Lightning shows out there can be spectacular, one strike hit beside our house that night and the bang was deafening....frightened the crap out of us. This was a storm brewing at sunset in central Qld. Pic is a little grainy it was taken with my phone but I like the colours in it. A dust devil or willy willy as they're called in oz. This was the biggest one I've seen but by the time I stopped the tractor and got my camera it was fading away. If you look to the left you can see a tall tree in the distance to get an idea of the size.

Thats not good...wonder if UH will bring out the 7600 in 1:32 they're models seem to be much higher quality, hope they do along with some of the vintage implements they also do in 1:16.

Hope they get it sorted because for me its a big disappointment. I was about to order one each of the 5000 and 7000 and two of the 7600's until looked at some pictures on a US retailer site.....now I'm not so sure. Whats the point in having a model that doesn't steer? Can the hitches be retrofited with the old britains type?

All of the spraying I did was with clear solutions but I remember reading an article a few years back about trials with suspensions in South Australia on calcereous soil with great results.

No but they finally caught up to the tractor halfway to Western Australia.

Nice pics especially the one with the Fendt. First contractor I worked for in Oz had challenger 55 for a few weeks before it was traded for a Case mx 270. We had it on a 25t chaser bin and was driven by a girl from UK. She was a great operator never kept us waiting in the combines. The tractor itself though was terrible to drive...rough as guts. Same with the Steiger quadtracs when you hit a stick or a stone it sends jolts up your spine.

Thanks fellas that explains a few things. I couldn't work why the ford 5000, 7000 and 7600 had crappy looking hitches and fixed axles when the old 6600 model hadn't. Sad about britains though they were the leaders for years when I was a kid.

Even lifting one of those links was a struggle......we'd reverse the tractors up to it and then it took two blokes to lift it up to the draw bar. Yeah with the gps it gets seriously boring, I used to read a lot of books. You hear lots of stories of blokes falling asleep and crashing into trees, or driving through fences etc. I know one contractor who supplied his drivers with mini dvd players....true. I laughed when he told me, thought he was having me on but as he said, he'd rather have them looking at dvds and staying awake than falling asleep and smashing something. There was a great photo in an oz farming paper a few years ago. A bloke was sitting on the bonnet of a steiger with his back against the windshield reading a paper while the tractor was ploughing. He was driving close to a road and someone snapped the shot. The caption read "Aussie farmers get lazy". Thats good old gps for ya.

Being new to model collecting or more like been out of the game for 20 odd years or so you'll have to excuse my ignorance with this......sorry guys, but are Britains owned by Ertl now or vice versa and who are rc2???

Excellent photos...reminds me of home.

Catcom3 that d11 is a serious machine.

Thanks mate. All the servicing and repairs for everything are done on the farm as you could be a few hundred kms away from the nearest dealer. Even when the electronics give problems in the tractors or combines we ring the dealer with the error code and they talk you through the repair....if they can't, they come out and fix it but you pay dearly for the privilage. That white Mack was a great truck, used to pull three 40ft trailers with it during harvest and you wouldn't even know they were there. Loved the roar of it when you hit the exhaust brake with a load. A good friend of mine wrote it off carting cattle about a year after the photo was taken. He ran off the road with 2 full cattle crates but he was ok and walked away without a scratch.....can't say the same for the poor old beasts in the crates. We had 10 trucks old to new for carting grain etc. The silver shed is the farm workshop. The blue truck is a brand new kenworth and the white Mack and crates that were wrote off. You can just see the giant stick rake for the front of the big komatsu beside the blue truck. This old girl was the service truck, it carried diesel, oils, water, grease etc and a compressor. When the novelty of driving the big gear wore off I looked after the maintainance end.....after a while driving up and down 3000 to 4000ac fields for weeks got seriously boring especially with gps. I used to do a run in this every morning and evening to service whatever rigs were working and then chase up and fix problems for the rest of the day in the 4wd.

All the tractors are new and kept for 3 to 4 seasons maximum before being replaced but they work up a lot of hours....almost directly after harvest all the tractors are run 24hrs cultivating, gas fertilizing, seeding and lots of other jobs in between. The kelly chains almost never stop from a few weeks after harvest until the crop is in the ground. The steigers are brought in new from the US. Same with the combines after every 3 seasons, they work hard too....starting in Qld and zig zagging all the way down to South Australia for the wheat harvest then they're straight back to Qld for the sorghum harvest.

Wheat prices vary every year, depends on demand and quality of the grain. Irrigated land get good yields but on broadacre 3/4 of a ton would be good. I've seen guys totally happy with a 1/2 ton. I've only harvested on one broadacre property where it was nearly a ton/ac. Nothing like the yields back in Europe but the grain quality here is really good prime hard. I have a friend in Central Qld who didn't have a crop for 4 yrs with the drought conditions here. Two years ago I was harvesting on a property in northern NSW and all I was doing was basically driving over bare earth stripping little bits of crop here and there so the poor bugger could try and recoup a little seed for the following year.....remember it took 6.5 hours to get 4 ton in the header box. Drought conditions have been really bad in some parts of the country for the last few years, lots of farmers have gone under and lost everything.