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Daniel: If you had two tractors, one wide front and the other narrow, you would very quickly discover the job you are doing may change your preference. There are just some jobs around the farm wide front works better while others and just as many I might add you'd prefer the narrow front. Personally I wouldn't buy an IH wide front tractor unless it was post 1963 or an offset. Those old wide fronts were so cumbersome, took twice as much room to turn one as the same tractor with narrow front. I'll just give you a sequence of new tractors as they arrived at our farm. W4 - 1942, then an H in 51 with both wide and narrow front plus a IH 31 loader that could only be used with narrow front. Dad was a non believer in narrow front. By the way, he only ever put that wide front on twice. I got ahead of myself, a Cub arrived in 50. Then in 55 a 300 narrow front only. 58 the Cub got traded for a 130. Around 59-60 dad got a buy on a used Cockshutt 540 with a Wagner loader, mainly because he didn't want a loader tieing up 300 from field work, and by then W4 and H were gone. In 63 we bought a 560D wide front, we wanted both and 300 was staying. We used the 560 on the haybine because one could keep it's wheels off the hay 80% of the time giving faster drying. The 300 very much remained our choice of baler tractor, why, the narrow front was so much more manuverable it would bale hay as fast as the 560. In fact I went on to buy a 504, 656 and 1066 and not one of those tractors have baled more hay, on a given day, on my farm than the old Farmall 300. Bear in mind, baling hay if you store it every day is more about manpower than horsepower. If I could have had more manpower, could those other tractors have baled more hay, I doubt it.
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