Do They Make Sense?
Concrete tractor weights used to be a thing! In the early 1900s when tractor wheels had spoked rims and solid rubber tires (or just steel rims), concrete was often used to add weight in efforts to improve traction, especially when working with plows. Some of these were poured in place and permanently affixed, while others could be installed or removed by using J-Hooks to connect concrete disks to the spokes of the wheel. These wheel weights, of course, had many issues. Overcoming the problems with cracking, water content, transitional forces, etc. was hardly worth the effort when cast iron was so much better. With very few exceptions, concrete weights are simply a blip in the history of farm tractors.
It is all about the mass and the density…
Without going into a lot of physics, assume we have two weights that are exactly the same size and one is made from cast iron and one is made from concrete. The cast iron model will weigh more as cast iron is much denser than concrete.
For the concrete model to equal the weight of the cast iron model, the concrete model would have to be roughly 3 times larger than the cast iron model. Hardly efficient. As we have noted in other posts, cast iron tractor weights hold their value very well. Home-made concrete tractor weights are simply an unrecoverable expense that may eventually create more problems than they solve.
The internet (and especially internet forums) contains many methods and instructions on how to make your own concrete tractor weights. They may (or may not) be better than nothing, but they will never equal the efficiency, last as long, or hold value like a cast iron tractor weight.
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