Honda-Powered Farmall H

Homer Weber has a Farmall H with a 500cc, twin shaft drive, Honda motorcycle engine. While he doesn't know what the drawbar horsepower is, he knows he can do 35 mph down the road when he drives it to area parades.

"I repair farm machinery, and a customer had an H with a bad block," recalls Weber. "He didn't want to fix it, so he sold it to me as is. I had this old motorcycle engine, so I decided to stick it in the H."

Weber fabricated mountings for the engine and modified the H drive shaft and the shaft coupler to the five-speed Farmall transmission. He cut off the original H clutch shaft and welded it to the Honda drive shaft. He used the universal joint from the Honda and substituted a true universal at the H's rear end.

"The coupler in the back of the H wasn't a true universal, so I had to put a universal in to match the one on the Honda drive shaft," explains Weber.

The Honda engine block contained the original five-speed motorcycle transmission and clutch. When Weber was finished with his modifications, he had a tractor with 25 forward gears and 5 reverse. He attached the Honda clutch to the H clutch pedal so he could shift both transmissions at once. He connected a rod from the Honda gear-shifting pedal to the former hydraulic lever by the steering wheel. To finish it off, Weber mounted a tractor exhaust on each side of the Honda two-cylinder.

"When I put it in first, it just creeps along, but when I put it in the top gear, it will do 30 to 35," says Weber. "I use it to pull equipment in and out of the shop, but mostly it's just used for fun."