Machinery Focus: Video – Big Fords and classic tillage
Austin Rothwell is a self confessed Ford tractor fanatic, especially those models with six cylinders under the bonnet, although he is partial to anything in the famous blue livery.Each year he holds a couple of private events at his farm in Co. Kilkenny to which he invites fellow enthusiasts to work their tractors on his land.
During the summer, he holds a silage day but come early autumn, when the fields have been cleared of crops, it’s time to get the ploughs out and start turning the land.
To help in this happy task, there usually arrives a good crowd of tractors and their owners to pull the assorted implements across the 16ac he sets aside for the occasion.
This year the numbers were back a little, but there were still over a dozen machines at work, all of them from the era of raw diesel glory, when advanced electronics meant two speed wipers and personal data was one’s entry in the telephone directory.
This period spanned the years between the emergence of the modern tractor with a standardised system of linkage and power take off (PTO), to the cusp of the digital tsunami which brought us up to the point where manufactures talk more of connectivity than they do of power output.
Ford force
It could be argued that the early 60s marked a major shift in tractor design; John Deere abandoned the horizontal two stroke, International was going great guns with the B450 and Ford moved on from the Major and Dexta, with a brand new range known as the 6X models.
The idea was right but its execution left much to be desired, that is until the heavily revised 6Y, or Ford Force, machines arrived and became a firm fixture of the farming landscape.
One of the great successes was the Ford 5000 which appeared with 75hp and went on to become a best seller.
