We have long given the advice that ballasting your tractor is extremely important. It's really surprising how many machines you're going to find out there in the open, right? Machines that have been sold and delivered to end users without ever having the conversation of ballast. It's an important conversation to have. It impacts the operation of your tractor in a lot of different ways. It's something that a lot of times your salespeople don't want to address because it's added cost in the purchase process of that machine. But as you're going to see here today, it's incredibly important to keep in the back of your mind. We're going to take this tractor here and pull it onto a set of race car scales, load the loader to its capacity with no ballast on the back of the tractor, and check and see how the weight distribution of this machine looks. See where that load is centered. We're then going to go and add appropriate ballast onto the back of the machine and see how these numbers all change.
This tractor overall weighs about 2,500 pounds. And you might expect looking at it that the large rear end back here is going to account for a substantial amount of that weight. But you might be surprised to learn that, once we're up here on the scales and looking at the weight distribution of the machine from the get go, here we are sitting empty. No ballast in the back, no load in our bucket, but already 60% of the machine's weight is biased towards the front of the machine. When you go to start lifting, you're going to want that weight back behind you, right? So here we sit empty and we're already having not enough in the backside of the machine empty. Now, even when you're not working and not working in a pile of dirt, this is going to cause transport problems for you, right? If you're driving quickly around your lawn or property, you're driving across bumps and ruts, that's already going to leave your back end a little bit light and a little apt to want to bounce up in the air as you're transporting around.
So I would say even looking at the setup of this tractor with no loader work in mind at this point, I would still want a little bit of ballast in the back end of the machine. But now we're going to take this and we're going to start adding weights to the front loader here to bring this thing up to its working capacity and check and see what happens. You may have heard me on my soapbox before about the lack of transparency in loader specifications. When you see these glossy brochures thrown around, there's often numbers admitted and things that make it a little bit difficult to know exactly what a tractor's capacity is. New Holland, at least here in the brochure, is giving a number that I feel is particularly important. It's the one at 500 millimeters forward of the mounting pin here, where the bucket attaches onto the loader, and also at full height.
That's going to be the most conservative number that you are going to get for, say, taking a pile of dirt and loading it into a truck. You do got to watch some companies that really try to claim massive loader specs, play extremely loose with these numbers, and will sometimes give you the number not in the bucket, but back at that pivot pin. And sometimes, at a carrying height, say at waist high, not at the loader's full extension. So know that there's a lot of games played with these numbers. Now, New Holland's own number here does not include the skid-steer coupler that this tractor is equipped with. So from the numbers here, if we look, the lift capacity of this loader at 500 millimeters forward of the pivot pin is 693 pounds. We're going to load this, though, with 600 pounds worth of weight, because this number does not include the weight of the skid-steer coupler, and has also shifted the bucket a little bit forward to that 500 millimeter number.
Our weights here are 50 pounds a piece. So in order to hit that 600 pounds, we're going to load 12 of them here into the bucket and see how it changes our figures. We talk a lot about specification and truth in advertising on this. And here's one thing I think it's important to still know. While I've put 600 pounds in this bucket, I didn't stop there because that's all it's going to lift. I stopped because it's the conservative number that I like to use when selling, because you're going to manipulate that load into any place. However, we can still start this tractor. And you can see, even with rev down, without full hydraulic pressure, we still comfortably move that load.
I can still feel a little uncomfortable too, with bouncing it around this. This Tractor's going to lift a whole lot more than this still. We could probably add another solid 400 pounds or so to that loader that we're going to be able to get into a pile of dirt and lift and manipulate. And so you're going to know at that point, even you can see with me bouncing out here on the front loader, your rear end is completely off the ground at that point. So keep this in mind, right? These loaders, when rated conservatively, are able to do a whole lot more than what that honest, conservative number says, right? As you're lifting closer to the ground or closer to the tractor, you can manipulate a whole lot more weight than you can the whole way up in the air, or if you're forward of the loader bucket.
So now we're going to go and start adding some weight back onto the rear of the tractor again, and notice how this balances back out. Exactly how much ballast is required on a tractor is often not a very clearly published number. When you're up in big agricultural tractors and field applications, yes, you're going to find a lot of data on this because your productivity in fields and tillage applications are really important, right? So a lot of work is done on that big farm machinery for ballasting. But on our smaller tractors, you're not going to find a whole lot of information. Now, we know from those applications that it's usually good to have 65% or so of the weight of the tractor towards the rear. So we're going to start loading this up on the back and see exactly how much weight it takes to get us there, but we're also going to stop at 500 pounds.
That's because most of the weight boxes that are sold, ballast boxes that we put in your tractors, are usually going to be made to hold 500 pounds. So we'll start loading up and see how our weight distribution changes. So loading up our tractor with a fairly typical 500 pounds of weight sitting back here on the three point hitch, we've moved this center of gravity back. So at the back side of the tractor, we're back to our 60/40 split again. About 40% back here at the rear, 60% up here at the front. Now, that's still not quite desirable yet. We're going to keep stacking some weights back here. But even that in and of itself has moved several hundred pounds off of that front axle, back to the rear, stabilizing the machine, making it nicer to work, taking that load off that front axle. So let's keep stacking some weights back here and see where we end up.
So our little tractor here now weighs 3,800 pounds with all of these iron weights stacked on it, which is pretty funny. But even here at this point, we're still sitting at a 50/50 weight distribution. We're not rear end positive at this point. It's going to be hard to ballast one of these tractors up to the point that you are truly rear end positive in weight. That's a lot of iron weights sitting back there. Now, granted, they are close to the tractor, right? And as these weights move further away from the machine, say where your ballast box would really be situated, they're more effective, right? So a 500-pound ballast box may very well be just as effective as my 800 pounds of weight sitting on the balls of the three point hitch. We send virtually every tractor of this size out with at least wheel weights at the very least. That 150, 200 pounds or so in the wheel weights in the back helps to at least plant this rear end. And that little bit of weight makes a big difference. And it's there and you don't ever need to think about it.
But continue to think with the capacity that this loader has. And with those high amounts of breakout and carry weight that you can get in a front loader like this, having even more weight back behind the tractor can be very beneficial. Now, you'll notice here a little setup on the back is definitely a don't try this at home type of setup, right? I'm standing here with my toes back from the weights for a reason. There's a lot of different ways that you can get this weight back behind the tractor. There's going to be hitches in the back that you could drop back here to hang weights onto. We've talked about ballast boxes a lot at this point. Every manufacturer offers a ballast box colored to match the tractor that you can load up with iron weights or concrete or stone or whatever to create that heavy load back behind the machine.
I also frequently see people take something as simple as a 55-gallon drum on a bigger tractor and add some three point hitch pins onto it in order to create that big load that they can stick behind the machine. I personally lean down the root of just adding implements, right? Weights aren't free. At this point, they're costing about $1.50 a pound. So this 800 pounds of weights back here is $1,200 in and of itself. That $1,200 can buy a pretty meaningful implement that you can put back here, so you're most of the way there to buying a rotor tiller or a cheap flail mower, or even something like a rear blade can be a couple hundred pounds that are going to give you something that's functional and has that weight to it and can be backed behind the tractor.
If you go down that route, you're going to want to keep in mind that banging around back there can be a little bit of a risk. Again, this is the route that I take. I carry a flail mow around on the back of my tractor most of the time, but it's wider than the machine is, and I've hung it up on trees and stuff from time to time. And if I'm doing a lot of work in the woods like that, that's not the kind of approach that I would usually want to take. Again, we return back to saying that we feel like, for most people, at the very least putting wheel weights inside of your rims or filling your tires with fluid, that gives you some of that ballast weight that's there all the time, and you don't have to think about it, right? When you want to go out and work and you put the key in the ignition, turn it, and go to work, the last thing that's going to go through your mind is, do I have the proper ballast? Because you're going out to get a job done, right?
So being able to have it built into your tractor where possible is important. And that's going to be necessary on any tractor, regardless of the machine's base weight. You'll see base weights of tractors thrown around a lot and claiming that one heavier one is better. One heavier one, though, doesn't necessarily have this same weight distribution like we're showing here today, right? You're going to end up with exactly the same problems and need ballast weight for exactly the same reasons. Every time we get out here with the scales and do a little bit of testing, I think I learn something new every time. And today, for me, that's just how much weight is needed in the back end of a tractor to really move this number in a significant way. There's a lot more forward bias in the weight of these small tractors than what I think you probably expect by looking at them. And you really want to push that rear end weight in order to make your tractors truly stable in operation. It goes a long way to be able to have that seat time and run around. It really changes the feel of the tractor quite a lot.
