Been thinking about a Belarus

D2Cat

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This guy makes 5 trips, 4 bales at a crack, 1/2 mile from haystack to bison every 3 days for 20 years. Amazing.

 
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85Hokie

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Talk about not needing your tires loaded! WOW - that guy haulin' some hay! What those bales run, a ton each?
 

bcbull378

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I just run to the bison, the best eating meat I've ever had and my family has raised beef as long as I can remember . We did use a Kubota to hang the bison to skin her out.
 

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Toyboy

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My friend went on a bison hunt, and said it was about as thrilling as shooting a suburban. Meat was great though.

That pix of the tractor is amazing. I never thought one of those would hold up very long. I wonder what his secret is to keep it going?
 

D2Cat

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Those bales are probably in the 1200-1400 lb. range. He has older equipment, so baler/tractor probably can't roll as tight as new balers, but he makes large dia. so he makes fewer trips.

Belarus has a less then stellar reputation in the USA because when they came here they did not have a good dealer network and never achieved one. The corp. is an interesting study.

Since they were made in the Soviet Union they were not welcomed with open arms by farmers in their introduction here. They were economical to purchase compared to USA competitors. Because manuals were not readily available, and service techs were left with little training, their reputation fell even lower. Owners had to be mechanically inclined to be able to fix their machines. Buying a new machine, and having to fix it without help, soon led to many negative results.

They were big heavy machines. Example, a 57 HP tractor weighed 7500#. Designed to be fixed in the field, since they were designed for 3rd world sales. They had power steering, air cooled or water cooled diesel engines. Some had pony engine as a starter assist when ordered. They had down pressure of 3pt.

Today opinions are negative because of hear-say, not first hand facts. So it's a buyer beware purchase, as is the case in all transactions.

Here's a later version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus_(tractor)#/media/File:Belarus_3022.jpg
 

hodge

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A friend of mine had one- the 57 horse model. When he got it, I scoured the tractor top to bottom, out of curiosity. When done, I told him I now understood why the USSR fell. Lots of backwards engineering. I couldn't get over how small the front driveshaft was- it was like an inch in diameter.
The tractor worked fine for him until it burned up in a barn fire; he replaced it with a John Deere.
 

06BlueRam

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I've had a 525m now for 22 years and love it. Had to replace radiator cap and the front wheel bearings on the right side. Light dont work any more, I just feed during day light hour. There built a little rough but it has always ran great.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk
 

tiredguy

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D2CAT,
tried to reply to your message but your mailbox is full and it rejected it.
Email me: cwtireal@gmail.com and I'll fill you in on the Belarus.

For everyone else I still have a 425AN 57hp 4WD Belarus that I've owned for
12 years or more and sold the 81hp that I owned for several years that went
from Michigan sold on Craigslist to a guy in California and now is working on a
farm in Vietnam. In that country Belarus and Kubota are King. My cousin also
had a 81hp several years older than mine sold on Craigslist last year and now
is working in Egypt they were more picky about having AC which mine didn't
ave. :D They're a bit crude the older one's anyway but a true work horse and
very economical on fuel. I've run mine 9 hours straight with a 7 foot brush hog while my cousin worked his 29hp Kubota the same number of hours, and we both used about the same amount of fuel barely squeezing in 5 gallons at the end of the day. The guy that owned my 81hp from new used it as a loader tractor feeding cattle and various daily chores replaced it with a 75hp
John Deere 4WD that he was not at all happy with because the Belarus ran
3 days before it needed refueling and the JD barely made it through one day
on a tank of fuel. The biggest problem I've experienced was getting used to
shifting the 57hp as the neutral is straight up and down and the gears are
left or right with a very narrow "gate". The 81hp which had the cab had the
worst shifter setup and to me a major pita. The 57hp has a separate gear lever for HI-Low range and the 81hp didn't and shifting it was like a U shaped
neutral down and over one way to get into Low range back and over to pick up Hi range. Mine was a 1996 and a couple of years and all prior models had
a knob that you twisted Left for Low and Right for Hi range very simple and
why they ever changed away from that I couldn't begin to figure. I've had a
lot of seat time in all 3 tractors and done repairs maintenance and for the money very hard to beat the value especially in a 4WD.
Al

PS D2CAT my next door neighbor has a sweet little D2 Cat in his building that
I'd like to own that hasn't been ran in well over 25 years but I'd bet money
could be fired right up easily after messing with the carb on the pony motor
used as the starter :cool: . He sold the factory backhoe attachment out of
the blue which I sure wish he'd have kept with it in case one day he finally
decides to get rid of it. He's 80 plus now I'm 60 and he'll probably out live me
so the chances are slim and none of me ever owning it LOL!
 

lugbolt

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My brother had a smaller one, built in the late 80's. Had a loader on it. I spent some time trying to figure it out. Air cooled big twin cylinder diesel. The most backward engineered pile of steaming feces I've ever laid my eyes upon. Easy to work on? Not really..not any easier than any of the JD stuff I've owned, at least not to me. He was bush hogging with it and the tractor literally broke in half. Clutch housing broke. Ended up scrapping it since no parts were available to fix it, nor did we want to fix it. It was given to him, and we passed it on to the scrap yard...for free.

What got me about it was that I think it was like 37 HP or something along those lines. Not a lot of power but it was a BIG tractor for the small amount of power it made. You didn't want to have to get on and off of it very often, that's for certain. With the way the "floor" was shaped, the pedals, controls, everything was completely and utterly weird; and of course with zero support here in the states, the only choice you had to figure out the controls was to just use them and figure out what did what. The writing on the decals was all Russian, might as well be greek to me since I'm fluent in redneck and English and nothing more. I reckon that makes me "bilingual".
 

D2Cat

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40 miles south of Kansas City
Lugbolt, I got past that idea. The guy selling the one I had in question was using it, and I needed something to work on!!

I found a couple of other projects. Here's a Massey Ferguson 50 with a Ferguson 100 loader.
 

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