Anyone who spends 10 minutes each morning killing e-mail probably is sick of the idea that size matters. But with farm tractors, it does.
The Big Bud V16-747 in Big Sandy, Mont., is the most powerful farm tractor in the world, unchallenged for 25 years.
It’s a cultural icon; practical proof that bigger can be better, and it’s as American as a baseball cap (and you can get a Big Bud one of those, too).
Visitors come from all over the world to Randy and Robert Williams’ 10,000-acre wheat ranch just to see it. A tour bus once brought 40 people from England. There’s a $120 diecast model, and the $1,000 signature series includes action figures of the two brothers.
Robert Williams compares keeping Big Bud to having a tame dinosaur that people line up to see.
“It’s been pretty unbelievable,” he said.
Big Bud’s 1,000 horsepower V-16 Detroit Diesel engine outpowers its nearest competitor by 25 percent. The tractor is 27 feet long, 20 feet wide and 14 feet high. It’s so big and tough. It lives outside in a land of sub-zero winters. Big Bud (the 747 is a nod to the Boeing jet which at the time was the world’s largest) runs on eight tires 8 feet tall, modified from an earthmover design with tractor lugs. And when its 1,000-gallon fuel tank is full, Big Bud weighs in at 130,000 pounds.
But the work this great white tractor can do is mind-boggling. Big Bud’s 1,472-cubic-inch engine can pull an 80 foot-wide cultivator at more than 6 m.p.h., digging shanks three feet into the ground. And it can plow an acre a minute, slurping three-quarters of a gallon of fuel as it does so.
These impressive numbers are founded on agricultural needs says Ron Harmon, whose Northern Manufacturing Co. in Havre, Mont., built the huge machine in 1977.
The V-16-747 is the ultimate expression of the Big Bud line, which was named for Northern Manufacturing shop foreman Bud Nelson and developed in Havre in the early 1970s. Horsepower crept up from 300 to 747’s 900as the company established itself as a specialized tractor builder. (After buying the tractor, the Williams brother bumped the horsepower to 1,000 with new injectors and an aftercooler.)
Harmon, 56, bought the firm from Willie Hensler in 1975, and he remembers how the Big Bud evolved.
Northern Manufacturing began selling Wagner tractors made in Portland, Ore., in the 1950s. At a time when tractor builders such as John Deere, J I Case and New Holland were selling two-wheel-drive rigid-framed rigs, Wagner had four-wheel-drive units that hinged in the middle, says Harmon.
Then John Deere made a deal to buy tractors from Wagner, which stopped supplying units to their Northern Manufacturing dealers, essentially putting them out of business. Havre was Wagner’s biggest dealership, surrounded by thousands of acres of dryland wheat farming for which the relatively fast and powerful 4WD tractors were ideal.
Starved of Wagner tractors, Hensler began building his own and had made about 20 by the time Harmon bought the business. He boosted the 350 horsepower rigs to 450 then 525 horsepower and ultimately to 740.
But the V16-747 is in a class by itself. In 1977 the Rossi brothers in Bakersfield, Calif., asked Harmon for a rig that generated 750 to 900 horsepower and could replace three Caterpillar D9 crawlers.
“It was a very practical request,” recalls Harmon, who these days runs Big Equipment in Havre. “The Rossi brothers had 10,000 acres of cotton. It took three D9s pulling five shanks each 36 inches deep to pre-rip the ground on rotation-one-third of the acreage each year. The D9s could do 15 acres in a 10-hour day.”
The Rossis wanted an 800-plus horsepower tractor that could replace all the Caterpillars. They gave Harmon $300,000, and, in June 1978, he delivered.
“They bought a 15-shank subsoiler and Big Bud could pull it at 6 m.ph. instead of 1 m.p.h., plowing 15 acres in an hour instead of one day,” Harmon recalls with satisfaction.
There was an additional bonus. Big Bud pulverized the ground so throughly with its shanks that the five passes required to take the old crop to seed bed were reduced to three, and sometimes two.
Big Bud worked in Bakersfield until 1985 when the Rossi farm was sold and Harmon found a buyer for Big Bud in Jim Satori in Florida. Satori paid almost $100,000 for the behemoth, planning to develop wetlands. But federal regulations scotched that idea, making Big Bud homeless again.
Harmon thought of Randy and Robert Williams in nearby Big Sandy. They’d known each other for years “we used to ride dirt bikes together” so Big Bud came home to Montana for $95,000 in 1997.
The Williams family has farmed outside Big Sandy since Harry Williams came west from Chicago in the Depression and married a local girl. The brothers had a 525-horsepower Big Bud they’d bought in 1983, and Robert was figuring how to pump the horsepower up to 600.
“We thought it’d be nice to have a bigger tractor, so we said sure,” says Randy Williams, 50. Robert is 53.
The first thing they did was rebuild the V16-747 Big Bud, making some modifications and rebuilding a spare engine with new injectors and an aftercooler to reach 1,000 horsepower.
Harmon says one strength of the Big Bud designs is the interchangeability of its parts.
“Big Bud has a fully self-supporting frame, and you can put any engine or axles under it. The powertrain system can slide out, be serviced and put back. The transmission mounts are bolted in, so you can run Allison, Fuller or Twin Disc power shift transmission. There’s a one-inch rail with different bolt holes so all Caterpillar, Detroit or Cummings engines can be fitted. The electric cab hinges up and the hood folds up so you can walk from the center to the radiator to work on it and update any components in later years.”
Updating is a major issue with Big Bud tractors. Farmers keep rigs longer than they used to, and the last new Big Bud 740 (which was smaller than the 747) left the shop in 1992.
“The average tractor used to be traded off after 3,000 or 4,000 hours but now farmers are keeping them more than 5,000 hours-closer to 10,000,” says Harmon. The Williams brothers have put 4000 hours on big bud since 1997.
Randy Williams reckons he and his brother have put more 4,000 hours on the V16-747 themselves, and he has no idea of the rig’s total hours.
“I guess we’ll keep as long as it lasts,” he says. “We’ve talked about using it for a few more years then restoring it and putting it in a museum-a big museum.”
The only problem they face is tires, says Randy Williams.
“They were specially built, and we really need some more,” he says. They were made by United Tire in Canada.
Big Bud has been displaced as the world’s biggest tractor in the Guinness Book of Records by another that’s 35-feet wide “but only 400 horsepower,” sniffs Harmon.
It seems like a misleading rating. You’d think power and weight would be the key to the No. 1 spot.
Randy Williams is unimpressed: “A while back they brought the biggest Caterpillar [crawler] tractor out to try to pull our cultivator, but it didn’t do very well,” he chuckles. “It had quite a bit of power but it only weighs 42,000 pounds and our cultivator weighs 30,000 pounds so pulling it was pretty tough!” meaning smaller tractor didn’t weigh enough to overcome the cultivator’s inertia.
