It took a pretty good man to crank a Farmall M with the hand crank. It had lots of compression, and the dangerous way was to push the crank down, then pull it up really fast and hard. Grandaddy told me never to do that, as it was too dangerous. Our M would crank just by pulling up on the crank, with half a turn, you might say.
Many a man was killed when they forgot to put the transmission in neutral before cranking it with the hand crank. If it was in a forward gear, and the tractor was parked under a shed, it pinned many a man against the wall and crushed him when it cranked.
SRH
