Tractor Upgrades: Lighting

In 1902, the first gasoline powered farm machines rolled onto farms. Farmers of the time quickly realized how much manual labor could be accomplished by one or two people and a tractor.

In 1917 Ford brought the Fordson Tractor to the market. As farm markets began to crash, Ford began a price war with the few competitors of the time. Through this action, ford made the tractor affordable to the average family. Some could even buy a Ford Fruit Wagon and a tractor together at the same dealership and use credit to take the pair home. Henry Ford actually demanded that his car dealerships sell the Fordson. Though many of those dealers were not pleased, this setup eliminated the overhead cost of a seperate dealership, ultimately keeping the price below all competitors.

Now we can take this post in a few directions. We can discuss how the purchase on credit by farmers was the beginning of the debt based economy we now find ourselves suffocating under. Another rabbit hole would be how the tractor affected the farming industry eventually leading to the great dust bowl and then to Corporate Agribusinesses. We can roll into how corporations like Monsanto devoured family farms. But no, that is not our purpose here. Here we will accept the tractor as a necessity for all but the most niche of micro farms. In my research I have come across one micro farm in Quebec Canada that uses a two-wheel tractor of sorts and that is it. Still most of us just cannot do without our tractors. We are on them everyday. We bathe, and feed, and care for our tractors as we do our family.

Tractors tend to not have enough lighting. There are few places to hold gear and accessories. Anyone farming in the country also has predation issues that must be addressed on a daily basis. There are accessory manufacturers that produce brackets and holders for all sorts of things. Most of them are ridiculously expensive and often easily reproduced with items from your scrap pile or some inexpensive parts from the hardware store.

In this post, we will discuss the LED lighting I attached to our tractor. Tractor headlights are in the nose of every tractor. They tend to be as bright as our cars and work fine driving forward. There is one tractor implement that interrupts our headlights and that is the front end loader. The average operator will travel with their bucket elevated two to four feet. With the loader bucket hanging there, all that is illuminated is the back of your bucket. Few of us are going to remove our front end loader to use our headlights. The best option then is auxiliary lighting mounted somewhere other than the nose of the tractor. After several trials, the ROPS bar (roll bar) is the best option I have found. I must make the safety announcement that all users manuals state that you should not drill into the ROPS bar or attach anything to it. It also states that the seat belt must be used every time you sit on the tractor. The best option therefore is to buy light clamps for $25.00 each, or make your own. fashioning your own will probably cost you about $5.00 per light bracket and 20 minutes to an hour for fabrication of each. I chose a different option that goes against the user manual but works very well and is extremely efficient.

The ROPS in made by taking two c-channel pieces and welding them together. The weld seam is on the inside and provides a guide line for drilling all your holes. Forward facing lights are forward of that seam and rear facing just distal to the weld. I mapped out the lights for placement and punched the spot for each bracket bolt. The holes were each drilled out starting with a pilot drill bit, then enlarged with increasing drill bit size until we reached the hole size for the tap. I had a tap that matched the bolts included with the lights and tapped each hole for the bolt. I went with Nilight and they do not sponsor this page in any way, however they are good lights at a good price. The kit came with a 20 inch bar (126 watts) and four four-inch lights (18 watts ea). I had two 6 inch LED's (36 watts ea) and a few old four inch LEDs in the spare parts pile so they all went on.

Power requirements. A watt is volts x Amps. It is imperative that you figure out the power requirements for any electrical project. Luckily this is fairly easy. The average LED uses 3 watts of power. The total watts for the 8 lights that I have installed is 288 watts. We know the voltage is 12. We need to know the amperage load. It is the amps that matter to our switches and wires. I like to think of the voltage as the lanes on the highway. The amps are the cars. So we need to figure out how wide that road needs to be to carry the amount of cars travelling on that road.

288 watts/12volts= 24 amps.

14 gauge 12volt wire can carry about 20 amps...up to 30 with 90 degree insulation. I like to overengineer to eliminate the chance for problems so I went with 12 gauge wire (also from my scrap pile). Now the Mahindra 2638 is equipped with wiring for a single rear facing utility light. This 16 gauge wire is not sufficient for my purposes, so simply tying in there failed with a blown fuse and a melted wire. For this reason, tying directly into the factory headlamp switch will burn out your tractor headlight system.

Still, I wanted to flip the factory headlamp switch and have night turn to day. This was accomplished with a bosch style 5-pin relay. If you do not know about relays, don't feel inept. They are very simple and there are videos on youtube explaining how they work and how to use them. For our purposes, all we needed was a four pin but, you guessed it, I had a stack of 5-pin relays "in stock". Real quick, the fifth pin (87A) is on when the switch is off. This is necessary for our high beam/low beam switching. When you turn on your headlamps power is going to 87. when you flip the high beam lever, the relay moves power to 87A which is connected to the high beams. In this project, we only need on and off.

Without the relay, we would have 24 amps running through the factory light switch. Keep in mind the tractor headlights are also running through a relay so that the switch itself only pulls an amp at most with its 18-22 gauge wire. Hook up your 24 amp light system and you have a blown fuse at best and a burned tractor at worst. Put the power through the relay and the relay to your switch and life is good.

I must admit that this left-side light does not survive. I do not know why, but whenever I drive through brush I hug the left side and this left side light has been ripped off of my current and past tractors. The threaded hole has survived unscathed but the mounting bracket from the light was destroyed each time. The lower light mounted to the front face of the ROPS is on a 2 inch wide L-bracket that held the monkey bars onto an old swing set. I have it bolted to the ROPS with a flat washer under and above the bracket so it will rotated. The light is mounted to the bracket with a bolt and washers that allows it to pivot about 1oo degrees. I had to round off the lights-side of the bracket with a grinder to allow for the 100 degrees of swing. This light with the green bracket is on the front face of the ROPS so it is fairly well protected from the brush and given it can be rotated to face the side, I have not seen a need to replace the side mounted light. There is another light with the same home-made bracket on the rear just above the 3-point hitch. Have you ever tried to put the backhoe on your tractor at 10 pm on a cold fall night, alone, with only your phone for a flashlight? I suppose this was a unique situation, however it left me with a conscious decision to never suffer this plight again. That night was the death of my mother-in-laws cherished ankle biter. You would have thought she was Jewish with the fervor in which she pleaded that we bury little Tucker that night. I had only one option...figure it out. The 20 minutes it took to attach the digger was pure misery. I really did not like that dog, still it hurt to watch him pass and even more to see Nana so sad. It was expected but that did not make it any easier.

That whole time I was thinking about the best option for lighting there. Now I have a light that can be angled fairly effectively to see the hydraulic connections or the 3-point connections. It can also be angled up for more rear lighting when the backhoe is off.

In this close-up, you can see the messy wiring job I did clearly. What you cannot clearly see is the hole I drilled in the ROPS to send the wire through. I could have just zip-tied the wire to the lateral ROPS but I did not want to effect the folding of the ROPS. I must admit that the lights being there and my general fear of rolling, encourages me to always keep the ROPS upright. our farm is on a ridgeline so steep angles is part of our normal, still every time I get over 6 degrees lateral, I am scared. There are times when you need to lower the ROPS to get under a low limb or into a shop with a low door. Running the wire through the ROPS in the down position ensures there is enough slack in there to put the ROPS down and then back up without any issues with the wiring. Also, I feel a nagging need to point out my wiring is messy. Most bloggers make sure that there projects are presented in a beautiful way. I do not really have time for beauty. I do know what I am doing with electrical and have the ability to match the presentation of most professionals out there. Still I just don't care how it looks. I do care that it works well and does not burn up anymore time than necessary. I did have buss bars and waterproof cases that could have been attached. If I had been installing these lights on a "customer's" tractor, I would have spent another hour to enclose all the wires, and add breakaway points in the wires. but I was not making money on this project and I am not trying to impress anyone. There is also a practical reason for this wiring. If a limb gets caught in the wires, it will just pull out of the connector and I can fix it in the field.

In closing, I would like to restate that drilling into your ROPS is not recommended by safety standards or any manufacturers. I would also like to say again that this makes for a simple and effective project. Adding effective lighting to your tractor will increase its utility. Assuming we ever get snow again, this lighting makes clearing it away late at night or in the wee hours of the morning much easier.