The International Harvester 956XL
The 956XL is a regular farming tractor which is purchased by ours 2nd hand in 1998 for driving the waterpump to sprinkle against nightfrost. This is also the reason it’s a 2WD tractor as we required a tractor with alot of HP without much extra’s and this one was available at the time with only 7000 hours. The tractor is built in 1985. This tractor is equipped with alot of nice options like a sunroof, modern gearbox, sensodraulic hitch (hydraulic fine hitch control), heavy front axle, pump protection and a luxurious XL cab.
A 5.9L 6-cyl diesel engine powers the tractor and delivers up to 95HP or 91HP onto the PTO which is actually a really efficient PTO and that’s great for our usage.
2015 The repaint
In 2015 we have been busy repainting tractors as our equipment was quite worn down in paint and it didn’t look attracting at all. We found it a necessity to repaint a few tractors which includes the international 956XL. Since the repaint the tractor stands out again and is great to look at or drive with. Back in the days our tractordealer painted all the frontplates of the internationals white while originally they were red. this looks alot better but also makes the tractors recogniseable and we decided to keep it like that after the repaint.
2019 Breaking the PTO
As of 2008 the heavy waterpumps run electric and the 956XL no longer needs to serve as main pumping tractor. We have always kept this tractor active in the years until 2016 for running a 30kva generator on a field that had no power anymore. during the winter the tractor was being used until 2013 for the aircompressor for prunning because it could run the aircompressor at 1000rpm which fills the tank up quite quickly.
in 2019 there were some issues with the watersupply and we had to run our 130M deep well again so we attached the 956XL for the pump to give it all it’s got. by the morning we were standing on the side of our waterbasin to see if we would make it for the last 2 hours when the 956XL suddenly started making a awful grinding sound and dropping waterpressure straight away.
I ran to the tractor to kill it, and we found out that the complete PTO bearing in the rearside we’re gone with the gears itself aswell. to get through the last hours we setup a case 2140 at the pump and gave that full throttle until that one got issues aswell after 2,5 hours but our fruit was saved…