Neil from Messicks here today with the New Holland Workmaster 25s. Today we're going to take a couple of minutes and walking around this tractor and show you the newest addition to New Holland's compact tractor family. In the last several years there's been some changes to CNH's distribution of their compact tractors. If you paid attention to this industry much, a lot of the outsourcing happens in this business between the manufacturers whose names are on the side of the hood and the companies that are actually building the tractors. Manufacturer relationships you're going to find in probably about 80% of the tractors that are out there today. 

New Holland made a pivot here several years ago, where they switched from a company in Japan that they had used for several decades that had been building their small tractors, and moved to a company out of South Korea. That relationship has been around for a while now and this product line keeps on getting bigger and bigger as they're becoming more entrenched with these companies and the market is starting to prove itself. This is now a widening of New Holland's compact tractor offering. Where in the past had been in the larger 30 to 50 horsepower sized tractors, we're now coming down into subcompacts. 

This machine has been on the market now for about a year and has actually done quite well for us. We'll show you why here a little bit. There's just some things that differentiate this tractor a little bit from the other machines that you'll find in the marketplace. I'm sitting here with New Holland's 100LC loader fitted onto this tractor, and this is actually a fairly strong loader for this class of tractors. You're going to get just about 700 pounds of lift capacity to full height in this bucket. One thing that I like about this, is the way that they've sized this loader to the tractor itself. We're seeing a lot of tractors in the marketplace right now, where their loaders are lifting in excess of what their front axle lift capacity is. If you look at compact tractors as a whole, one of the most common repairs that you'll do on these machines is in the front axle seals right here. Part of the reason why is because these loaders can really push the boundaries of what these front axles are able to carry. 

New Holland actually does publish a front axle capacity for this tractor which is pretty unusual. You don't see a lot of companies playing that number out there. In this case, it's 1400 pounds. Even with a load out there being bounced around and it worked with a fairly capable loader, you're going to know that you're within the front axle capacities of this tractor. I can tell you, not every company on the market is doing that today. 

Underneath the hood then here you'll find a very well-known YANMAR engine. YANMAR is one of the bigger small engine manufacturers in the world and known for making a good quality engine. You're going to find really reasonable noise and vibration levels off of this tractor. Horsepower-wise, it's a Workmaster 25s. That 25 denoting its horsepower, so this one is going to come in at just under 25 horsepower. In the world of small tractors and subcompacts, in particular, that's towards the upper end. You're going to find some tractors coming in below this number, but not a whole lot exceeding it in this size machine. As far as the power to rate ratio of this tractor goes, it's right up there near the top. 

We are big proponents of metal tractors with as little plastic in them as possible and this one does not disappoint. You'll wrap on the hood there you'll feel a nice ring from a fairly stout metal hood. If you pop this up you'll see the gas strut that's in there in the structure that's behind this make it a fairly rigid system that just feels good when you slam it. The significant capacity of this tractor continues at the back end as well, so you're going to find a really strong three-point hitch made into this tractor. If I'm honest about one thing I think could be a little bit better back here, it would be some of this linkage, the plating and the construction of this I think could be a little bit better, but your specifications are in line with where they should be, and there is a nice feature back here as well to be able to remove this without too much hassle. You have a multipart hitch back here that if you're not using this linkage very often, which a lot of people actually don't, it's fairly easy to take off the back of the tractor. 

This tractor doesn't lack for creature comforts either. You'd be surprised how often some of these things are optional equipment, but you're going to find standard armrests, cup holders, a cigarette plug down here at the bottom if you want to plug in your cell phone. Also up here on the ROPS, you'll find there's a toolbox, a little plastic [unintelligible 00:04:17], and you can never have enough places to store tools and stuff on your tractor. One thing I would consider would be to taking this toolbox and flipping it to the inside of the ROPS. This is just held on here with u-bolts. The factory delivers them here on the outside but doing a 180 with that guy is going to make sure it doesn't get cleaned off the side of your tractor by a tree branch. 

One feature that's on this machine that's usually found on bigger tractors, is the fact that the power steering and the implement hydraulic pumps are separate. Not all tractors in this class are going to be mechanically set up that way to have two separate pumps to feed those different systems. Where that comes into play is if you're really talented in doing things like using your power steering while operating your loader up and down, you possibly run into situations where you can cause hydraulic flow to want to fight for one side or the other. The total flow of these pumps is in the range of where most of these tractors are going to fall, but it's mechanically being driven by two separate hydraulic pumps. 

Larger operators might find the New Holland tractor being a little bit more comfortable than others, and that's partly because of its large operating space down here in the bottom for your feet. The pedal system on this is a side-by-side pedal for forward and reverse, which opens up the floor pan a little bit more and gives more space for your feet down here. You're also going to find that the seat is on a slight incline, so as you take the seat forward and back it raises up as you go back which is generally a little bit more comfortable operating position. 

Controls on small tractors like this are fairly common from one machine to the next. If you hop on other brands of tractors or you've operated in another subcompact before, almost everything here is going to feel very familiar to you. On your right-hand side over here, you're going to have a range selector for the transmission, a high or a low with a neutral in the middle, and then you're going to use your front pedals up here to go forward or back. Inside of that here you have an up and down control for your mower deck and your three-point hitch. These will raise those hitches up or down and also allow you to raise that mower deck up and down as well. This does not do your cutting height. In order to set your cutting height, you want to lift your mower deck up and then you have a dial down here between your legs to change the stopping point of where that mower stops when you lower it down. 

Ahead of your orange range selector over here, we have a four-wheel drive, a simple two or a four very easy, stop the tractor pull the lever to drop it into gear and off you go. On my left-hand side over here, I have my PTO selection, either my mid my rear or both of them can be operated together if you're going to do something like run a powered bagger with your mower deck at the same time. The tractor's dash up here has a handful of different readouts on it. I've got a parking brake, oil indicator, cruise control locks, glow plugs, all the things that you're going to expect an indicator for up here on the dash. One kind of neat thing on this tractor that more of them should consider is that, if you have the parking brake [beeping] off, and the tractor's shut off, it's going to sit here and beep at you. That's a good safety feature something guys often forget when they jump off of a machine. 

I have a switch up here for my headlights and my turn signals, so I can do all that right here. I have a small throttle up here on the dash and a switch to turn my PTO on and off. This would be an electromagnetic PTO. When you want to turn it off, you can simply come up here to the knob and bump it and it pops right back to the off position, which is kind of nice when you're getting to the end of a row if you're mowing or something like that. 

Your loader on this tractor is going to work up and down to raise the boom up and down and left and right in order to operate the bucket. You're going to find float functions on here, if you're going to say push the snow off of the driveway when you go the whole way forward, it will put that loader in afloat and allow it to skim the driveway as you go back and forth. That's an easy function right there. 

I've been joking with some customers lately that I think cruise control on tractors is a little bit silly, but they've corrected me and said they actually do use it, which just maybe not for me, but apparently it is for some guys. This button right here is going to operate your cruise control. A lot of machines, you're going to find a mechanical latch where this one is going to be electronic. If you push your hydrostatic pedal down, you simply push that button there in order to lock it in place and set that cruise control. When you're ready to bump that off, you can either set the rocker switch down again in order to disable it or pop the brake pedal in order to release it. I did find myself wanting to operate the forward and reverse pedals here to release the cruise, and that does not work surprisingly, so you got to know once you get that thing set exactly how you need to shut it off again because it was not as intuitive as what I expected. 

One of the videos that I did has gotten a lot of comments and a lot of feedback was one about tractor roll bars and how you as an owner should not be modifying them. These are certified safety equipment, and if you're going and taking say a drill and drilling holes into a roll bar, you're now modifying that structure and now have some liability if that happens to fail and that causes an issue of that tractor say traded back into a dealer again. We always are concerned about the liability that could happen by trading and reselling a machine with modified safety equipment. 

New Holland actually has some tabs and stuff welded on this which is smart. Oftentimes work lights are put on the roll bars with u-bolts and stuff. In this case, there are tabs welded on here with holes in them that you could use to put in say, a light bar, or other accessories that you might want. Now because they're here already, and they don't have to be modified or added, they're part of the engineered structure of that roll bar and are safe to attach things to. 

If you've watched me enough by now, you know that one of my tractor pet peeves is a drive-over mower decks, I am just generally not too much of a fan of them. One of the reasons I don't care for them is because there are a lot of tradeoffs when companies start building mower decks as drive-overs. This is not a drive-over mower deck and I am glad for that. Drive-over mower decks tend to not have very much lift height underneath the tractor, and there's, oftentimes concessions made in the way these pulleys are set up in order to be able to get some of that height back. If you look at say, our green friends down the road, you'll find some really small drive systems on top of their mower decks because they don't have the space in order to fit heavy components down here. You'll find here in the New Holland, a big double stack or about an inch and a quarter thick belt, a belt that's going to last a long time and you're not going to be replacing. That's a much heavier duty drive than what you'll find on some competitive machines. 

That's a little bit on the Workmaster 25s. If you're in our area and we can get you in the seat of one of these tractors, we're glad to have you come out, walk you around a little bit, operate the machine, and just see how it fits for you. If you're going through that buying process, if we can help, we're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.