It lives!

Most of you will know that we have had an old ford tractor sitting on our driveway for about 3 years.  Last night we decided it was finally time to start the work of getting it running again so that we can use it on the farm but first a bit of background.

This style of tractor (the Ford N series – 2N, 8N and 9N) was the most popular tractor in America when it came out.  Shockingly, about 60% of the tractors sold back then (1940’s – 1960’s) are still running somewhere.  The reason is that these machines are so simple there’s just almost nothing that breaks on them!  They are also designed so that an average person can work on them.

Isn't she pretty? 

Ours came from Jeremy grandfather by way of Jeremy’s uncle and is a 1945 Ford 2N (the oldest version of these tractors) making it now 67 years old.  In 1984, Jeremy’s grandpa bought 2 of these tractors.  He took the attachments he wanted and the newer of the two out to Colorado with him when he retired and left the other tractor and unwanted attachments in Kansas on his son Rob’s farm.  Uncle Rob used the tractor once in a great while, so it mostly spent the next 15 years sitting exposed in a field.  When we bought land in Arkansas and were talking about wanting something that we could leave down there to brush hog with, Jeremy’s grandfather, Ott, said we could have this tractor.  We were told at the time that it has a crack in the block that “seals up once she gets warm”, that it needed a new battery and that it needed new front tires.  In the process of loading and unloading it, we also determined that it needed new brakes. 

The list of things to fix and the fact that Jeremy broke his foot on it bringing it home, meant that we felt this was a big job requiring some serious time commitment.  Sufficed to say, we didn’t find the time until now.  When we started working on it about 7:30 last night, we expected to get the tires aired up (to see how bad the leaks are) and maybe get it to turn over if we could successfully jump it from our truck (a simple car battery doesn’t have the juice to jump the tractor). 

Old farmer teaching us about our old tractor

We borrowed an air compressor from our neighbor and hit the gold mine.  It turns out that our neighbor, Ralph, spent a healthy portion of his younger life driving and working on ford tractors.  He came over to help us set up the air compressor and it was like watching an artist with their chosen media.  He leaned over and adjusted this knob, turned this under the hood, put this here, directed us in a few things to help and in about 5 minutes the old tractor was running on the driveway!  We couldn’t believe it.  It literally just took putting air in the tires and jumping the battery and she was ready to go.  Also, the thing with the brakes turned out to be that the right brakes were just locked up.  Apparently WD40 fixes that so no need to fix the brakes.

Tractor on life support

We drove it down the driveway to make it easier to load tomorrow and take out to the farm and sat back to marvel and this little tractor.  Our neighbor also kindly offered to come out to the farm with us on Friday and help us get comfortable with driving it and using the implements we have (blade and a 2 bottom plow).  We will need to get a new battery (this one can be jumped but doesn’t hold a charge) and add some hydraulic fluid before she’s running great, but we now have a working tractor!  If we’d known it was that easy, we would have used it to clear the roads of all the snow 2 winters ago. 

So now we can add “tractor” to the list of old tools we are ready to use on our farm.  With a little luck, this old guy will help us do a lot of work this weekend.