On Mon, 2 May 2016 22:39:47 +0100, bert wrote:

In article ,
writes
On Sun, 1 May 2016 04:47:36 -0700 (PDT), Weatherlawyer
wrote:


Any idea how much horse power that old TVO represented?

Well now that we have all set off down to the good old days, batons in
hand, how about soem throughput for the OP?

How much of a game changer was the 5 (or less) horsepower engine when
they started to get a grip on farms?

Apparently the 5-Hp was quite a substantial motor, for its time.
Anyone have any real idea?

Something from the Victorian peasant's Space Age. How the Wright
engine worked:


Small IC engines made a huge difference from the 1900's but especially
after so after WW1 but not in tractor form*.
So when did the Standard Fordson, become commonplace? (The one with
single pedal for clutch and brake. I can remember driving one as a kid
in the 50s - no elfin safety in those days) It had metal wheels with the
lugs for grip. Tyres were an optional extra

It was introduced in WW1 as the Fordson F being purchased from the US
by the Government, a lot of horses had been sent to the battlefields
of France. It started to become common place on larger farms during
the 20's especially has Henry Ford moved the factory first to Ireland
and then Dagenham by which time the tractor had been modernised to the
N type which was produced until 1945 with again vast numbers being
built to improve agricultural efficiency during the war and quite a
few variants for the construction industry and the services ,the RAF
had many to tug aircraft and bomb trolleys around. A huge number
became available after WW2 and after that is when they really started
to displace the Horse even on small farms. As mentioned up thread my
dad got one around then.
The Fordson wasn't much more of a horse substitute though it could
have a pulley for driving saw benches and threshing machines etc thus
replacing traction engines and some later ones did have an optional
PTO shaft with a minimal guard put just where if your foot slipped
off that pedal you remember you stood on it. For small farmers like
my dad you adapted the old horse drawn implements from shafts to a
central hitch point and carried on using them though the ability to
haul more weight than a horse did allow some more modern equipment
such as balers or small towed combine harvesters which had their own
small engine to power them .

The Fordson has been called the tractor that won the war but like
Churchill towards the end it days were over.
Ferguson's tractor with it's new features such as the 3 point linkage
and hydraulic lifting and designed for a PTO from the start made it
obsolete at a stroke.
Another reason why Fordsons were cheap to acquire afterwards.

Ironically as Ford had moved his entire tractor production to Dagenham
including those for the US market the farmers of the US had turned
away and bought other US makes to the extant that they needed a really
good innovation to reestablish themselves in the US which is why they
grasped Harry Fergusons design with gusto and started production in
Detroit under the Ford badge just before WW2 and it was the fallout
afterwards that lead to the post war ones being built in the Standard
factory which was spare from having been a wartime production unit
rather than in the Ford UK plant.

What isn't often mentioned that the very first Ferguson tractors were
built in the mid thirties jointly with David Brown who later lent his
initials to Aston Martin models after he bought the company.
Ferguson and Brown had different ideas and went their separate ways.
If they had stayed together would Aston have made four wheel drive
before Jenson used the system?
G.Harman