We have showed you video and told you about Kory Anderson’s incredible recreation of a Case 150 steam tractor. This $1-million dollar plus project brought back to life an extinct mastodon of a machine from the most awesome era of steam tractors ever. It is not a restoration but a complete recreation that took years and years to properly execute and boy did he! The 150 stands for the horsepower racing of the engine, which was beyond stratospheric for this era. The whole thing is big from the physical size to the performance. There’s one number that’s not just big, it is incredible and that’s the torque output of the machine. You are about to watch it make 5,000 lb-ft and basically have to quit before it gets to peak.
This is not theory, this is math and engineering as the tractor is being tested by using a Prony Brake dyno. This is a basic and old school dyno that has been used to test tractors for years and years because it’s designed to be used with anything that has a flywheel and can spin a belt. In this case the belt is enormous and that causes some problems as you’ll see.
Basically the way the dyno works is that there’s a lever with weight that’s added. As the lever gets weighed down it presses on a brake. Eventually the brake is brought to a stop. One can determine how much torque and power the flywheel is sending out by calculating the weight on the end of the lever arm in relation to the engine speed, etc. The video does a really nice job (via the announcer) of walking us through the numbers and how they are being figured.
This thing is a beast and when the heavy weight gets on the lever and the belt starts flopping, the engine is starting to snort and chuff hard. This is awesome.
