If you're into steam engines.

Justsomedude

You have to check this out and watch until the end. It didn't even pretend like it was gonna bog down 😳

zorba

What is that plow? A 50? This is beyond cool, my kind of technology for sure! Not a touch screen or microprocessor in sight.

Justsomedude

Alot of people don't know the amount of torque that a steam engine produces is astronomical compared to IC engines. Theres power throughout the complete stroke of the piston. That tractor just pulled three plows combined like it was nothing.

pjames777

Beast!  Age of steam built America's industries in every arena.  Still very functional today

tennmike

Those fire tube boilers had/have to be cleaned on a regular basis to keep the tubes free of soot buildup. That's why boilers in electric generating pants are water tube boilers with the fire heating the tubes. Steam engines can produce huge  amounts of power and torque, like Justsomedude said. I know of one steam engine powered sawmill still in operation in my general area. It's a 'two lung' engine with horizontally opposed pistons. It doesn't even slow down when a HUGE log is cut into boards or beams.

One of my jobs at the nuke plant was running two 40,000 pounds per hour 250 psi water tube boilers fueled with diesel fuel to supply startup steam for the main turbine and other equipment requiring steam at startup, like the turbine steam condenser for drawing a vacuum on the condenser. Each boiler had two 'guns' that sprayed diesel fuel into the boiler, and had integral igniters on them. Only one gun per boiler was used at a time, and the gun in service had to be cleaned daily. You made for damned sure the gun being put in service was running hotternhell before taking the in service gun out of service to prevent a flameout and boiler shutdown. Took about 20 minutes to restart. It was taken out of service after the spare was put in service.

On cold boiler startup, the  gun used compressed air to atomize the fuel to start up the boiler and then switched manually to steam when the boiler reached 100 lbs. steam pressure. Not a fun job if you did it wrong and blew out the flame and had to restart. The igniter on the end of the 'gun' was like a HUGE sparkplug and had to be gapped just like a regular spark plug. Pulling out the gun taken out of service was exciting as it was about 8 feet long and around 70 pounds, and flame blew out of the hole the the gun was extracted, and each boiler had an instrument rack in front of it that provided interference when removing the gun. Welders gloves were a necessity for pulling out the hot gun. 

Running the boilers was one of my favorite jobs, though. NOBODY messed with you when you were running them. Just sit there, watch the instruments, and scream into the radio when some fool started using steam without YOUR permission. I kind of miss that job. 

Gene L

I believe those are turning plows.  Takes a lot of power to move gang plows like that.