Most of your machines from about 30 horsepower on up are going to be equipped with split brakes or steering brakes, depending how you want to refer to them. They can be incredibly useful. But most of the time, when we look at tractors, we find that many operators have never experimented with them, never flipped open that little latch that enables their use. So we're going to take this tractor here today, explain to you all the things that you can do with steering brakes and show the impact that they can make on the maneuverability of your tractor.
Safety alert, what we're going to do here when we start messing with the brake pedal does have some possible safety implications that you should be aware of before you start messing around down here. In their default state, when these two brake pedals locked together, this little yellow latch right here is closed across the pedal, making both of the pedals work together. If you have an oh crap moment and stomp on the brakes, you're going to lock in the tractor's rear end, both of your tires together. However, when you enable these steering brakes and flip that latch open, if you have that oh crap moment, you could stomp on this brake pedal, and if you only hit one of the pedals, not both, you're only going to break one wheel, potentially making that, oh crap moment even worse. So do understand when you play with this latch, it's yellow here for a reason because there are some safety and movement implications for how your tractor functions.
Now on the brake pedals themselves, as I've just described, they're going to break the left and the right rear tire on your tractor. When you press one pedal here or the other. Now there's a lot of different times that you may want to do that. When you go to make a really tight turn with your machine, by breaking the inside tire on that turn, you're going to make the tractor much more maneuverable. You can make really tight turns like we're going to show you here shortly, but there are some other applications for it too. Your tractors have an open differential in the rear end. There's no limited slip functionality back there. If you get your tractor hung up in the mud, you can break the wheel that's spinning to force that power to your other wheel that might have traction. Now you can do that with the diff lock too, but you can hit these brake pedals on the go. You can vary that tension a little bit. That might help you get unstuck a little bit more easily.
They can also be used for steering the tractor in a straight line, at times when you might be compressing your loader into something. Say if you're using a box blade and you have a lot of snow in front of the machine, and as you're pushing into that, it lifts some of the weight off of your front wheels, making it difficult to steer. You can also steer the tractor in some ways using these left and right pedals, breaking the rear tires of the machine. Now, when a modern tractor using steering brakes can be difficult. This is kind of call it technology that originated back with older machines where gear drive transmissions were pretty common and you didn't have, have so many pedal functions on a machine like you do today.
So on this L2501 that I'm sitting on right now, I have a clutch that I need on my left hand foot. I have a hydrostatic pedal here on the floor to do my drive. And I have my steering brakes up above the hydrostatic pedal. It creates too many things here. You need a third leg in order to operate all of this stuff. So what you're going to see me doing here today is cheating a little bit, using both of my feet here on one side of the machine. So I can operate the hydrostatic and do my steering brakes here at the same time. In subsequent tractors, you're finding more and more that companies are going away from having the clutch pedal, and using a hydraulic, an electric over hydraulic engagement for the PTO. By removing that clutch pedal, they could then move the brakes to the other side of the machine that makes this functionality a lot easier. This is a standard L01 series.
The 02 series that's going to arrive on my lot here literally any day, has had that done where those clutch pedals are removed and the brakes are moved to the other side of the machine. So this is pretty trivial to do on any tractor that's gear drive. But when you have a hydrostatic with split brakes, you got to look at how the pedal arrangement's done. And you might find yourself kind of looking a little goofy, like I'm going to here today.
So the test that we're going to do for you here this morning is making four different turns. We're going to go and make turns in both two wheel drive and four wheel drive and with, and without the use of the split brakes. So we're going to start here with this can of white spray paint and mark the starting point of this tire. The little white line here on the ground, so we know where we're going to begin. Start this up and make a turn in four wheel drive with no split brakes, which should be our worst case scenario. So we're going to take our tractor here. We're going to bring our steering wheel to hard lock. We are in four wheel drive without the use of split brakes.
When we come around to 180 degrees, we're going to put another white line here and our inside tire. And when we take our measurement here, you'll see why this isn't super common practice. And a lot of tractors now, it's just simply unnecessary because the steering angles of these machines are so, so tight that you often don't need it. Now on bigger field tractors, it's often a different story because they have much longer turning radiuses than this does. But here at four wheel drive, I'm at 112 inches. So nine feet, four inches between those two lines right there in four wheel drive. So for our next demo, we're going to do what should be the next step down here. We're going to kick the tractor out of four wheel drive into two, but I'm still not using the steering brakes. We're go to hard lock here in our tires, bring the machine around. And two wheel drive should take off a little bit of that turning radius, and we can see it did. Because you don't have those four wheel drive tires pushing you out of your turn.
All right, so you take our mark right there, pull out our tape measure. We were at nine foot four before, and this takes us down to seven foot nine. So we're taking about two feet off of our turning radius by coming out of four wheel drive. But adding steering brakes is going to take us a step further. Now for our next step we're going to take the tractor here in two wheel drive. I'm going to reach out here with my foot and step on the steering brake. That's going to brake my inside tire, come over here to hard lock, and I'm going to start to drive. Now you can see here, my wheels basically not moving, right? I'm almost pivoting on that point. And I start to work my way around now in two wheel drive here, you'll almost need some traction from those front tires in order to help steer the tractor, but that is a tight turn. So that guy comes in there at a meager 39 inches.
Let's see what happens at four wheel drive, all right, four wheel drive on our line, hard block braking inside tire. Now I can see here, I'm doing a mess of turf damage as I go. Coming around here, I have added a tiny amount to our turning circle. So you can see here there's only a tiny little difference between the two wheel and the four wheel drive. I'm coming up at six inches. And to be honest, I've gotten different results when I've done this before this tightest measurement really varies depending going how much traction your front tires are getting, and their ability to pull the front end of the tractor around as you make that tight turn.
So you can see here from our lines on the ground, the dramatic difference that we can make in the tractor's maneuverability by using those steering brakes. I can go from one pace here, turn inside of pace when I'm using those breaks. But taking another brush, nearly pace and a half to come out this far to where a traditional turn would be. So if you're working in an agricultural application where you have tight Headland turns to make, or you're working out in the woods, and you're in a congested area and need to wiggle between some trees, this can really help you make those kinds of turns. If you look at the ground here, you'll notice that I'm doing significant turf damage, by breaking these tires and dragging them through the ground. I'm taking a lot of the grass and stuff up with me. So probably something you don't want to do if you're out trying to mow your lawn.
