Danny Radford’s 1926 (ish) Fordson F is back up and running, just short of 100 years since it first rolled off the production line in Detroit, USA
Having sat in pieces for much of the last 50 years, one more Fordson F is back up and running – at Danny Radford’s property in Kojonup, Western Australia.
Fordson tractors were manufactured by the Ford Motor Company’s Henry Ford & Son mark in the United States, Ireland and later England from 1917 to 1964, with the models exported around the world.
Using the production line system for which Ford was famous, the Fordson tractor secured a reputation for being an affordable model that was light, easy to clean and able to handle different farm tasks.
But, and particularly for the early Fordson F series, the reputation was not entirely positive – without an oil pump, the Fordson F was known for running into problems when working sinking dams or doing earthworks, as the front bearings would run out of oil when the tractor encountered a steep slope.
Museums Victoria curator of Engineering David Crotty writes of early reliability problems including wheelslip and “a dangerous tendency to flip over backwards if a plough struck a hard object in the ground” – a tendency even more dangerous in a vehicle with no rollover protection to speak of.
Radford says his memories of the Fordson F’s ploughing ability is somewhat happier, when he recounted his father’s experience with the tractor and its factory-issued steel wheels.
“I never ever remember the tractor having steels on it because I wasn’t born when Dad changed it over to rubber,” he says.
“The reason he changed it over to rubber tyres was because when he first bought it, he tried to pull a plough … and it just got stuck and dug its own hole – and the steel tyres just made it worse. Rubber tyres would be handy!
“So his father-in-law bought him the rubber tyres. And they were still on it when I picked it up, but they were completely gone by that point.”
The steel tyres, like much of the rest of the tractor chassis, remained under a tree on the family farm or the rest of his father’s life, with Radford and his siblings playing on them after school.
In time, Radford’s brother took over the farm and eventually sold the property, with the old tractor and its components pulled apart for separate sale.
Many years later, Radford set out to restore the old tractor based on what remained.
A water washer, which functioned as an air cleaner for the Fordson F’s original kerosene/petrol engine, had been sold in the clearing sale, but a friend was able to provide Radford with another – and other friends helped provide kingpins, a manifold and a vaporiser.
Most Fordson owners preferred to use kerosene to power their engines, but due to the fact that the kerosene tank in his own machine was beyond repair, Radford decided to run the fixed tractor on petrol.
The tractor also has some of its original trembler coils, which when the tractor’s hand crank is turned can produce enough current for it to start the engine – though Radford says there’s often a lot of work to do to produce enough charge.
This, he says, was one of the reasons behind the Fordson Fs lost their appeal for a group of people previously more accustomed to a horse than a tractor.
“This (tractor) is between 1926 and 1927 factory date and it is getting very close to the last of the Fs, which ceased production in 1928,” Radford says.
“They did away with the trembler coils because they couldn’t start them and all that sort of thing, they just discarded these tractors because they were just too troublesome,” he says.
Radford says this was almost certainly true for his father, who he remembers didn’t keep the tractor for very long as the main one on the farm, later upgrading to a Massey Harris pacemaker and an E1A Fordson brand tractor.
So in a slight concession to modernity, he’s installed a battery that helps to get the motor running – a motor that Radford has now entirely rebuilt.
“I put better rings in it out of another old tractor and I didn’t do anything to the crankshaft – just left it as it was.”
With the original belt pulley having entirely rotted away, a new one was secured from a neighbour’s clearing sale for $10 and, as Fordson radiators were largely unchanged all the way up to the Fordson 27N, Radford was able to get a new one relatively easily.
Even three of the four spark plugs, which were hard-to-find half inch BSP thread Edison models, were secured from Radford’s brother-in law.
“They are a very special spark plug because their design is completely different to the modern ones today, with a long electrode inside.
Now completed and operational, there’s no plans for the Fordson to be polished up or widely shown off – as Radford is happy to celebrate a job well done.
“If Dad was alive today, I think he’d be quite proud that I actually did get it going, because he just discarded it – it wasn’t valuable to him,” he says.
“But I wanted to put it back to where it originally was – that’s what it is, just riveted together and it runs fine!”