Ferguson TE-20 Guest Post

[Today I have a special treat, MaxDamage kindly supplied a guest post! I’m a pics or it didn’t happen fellow so he also provided a gorgeous photo! Here’s the background:

During the (still ebbing) winter of doom I whined I was a losing the battle. Keeping my driveway open had turned from holding the line, to a tactical retreat, and then into a rout. (I didn’t blog the half of my travails!) I embrace “two is one and one is none” but ran out of options as one machine after another gave out.

My first and favorite tool is a sweet little 1944 Ford 2N. These plucky little antiques are great snow movers in moderate situations. Alas, mine is owned by a mechanically inept chimp. It never runs.

Plan B is my old ATV. It worked it’s heart out until the transfer case failed. Having bravely fallen in battle, it earned a place of honor in the garage. It remains on the disabled list but will be repaired this summer.

Plan C was to throw money at the problem. Hiring a snowplow guy always leads to drama and this year’s effort was practically a Greek Tragedy. The guy I hired had better equipment than most but it didn’t help. He got curb stomped by bad luck the likes of which would make a blues player cry. If you’re think life is handing you lemons, you should talk our plow guy; he got his lemons delivered rectally.

I flailed about with plan D (a snowblower, shovels, an ice fishing sled, and eventually patient resignation) while someone mentioned I should restart my Ford. I didn’t bother. Even when the little Ford is running, it lacks a front blade. My back blade can only handle a few inches of snow before the tractor wheels (which are in the snow instead of the plowed area) get deep and start spinning.

This is when MaxDamage sent me a post about his front blade. It’s mounted on a Ferguson T20 (a mechanically identical twin to my Ford 2N). It’s the manliest, ugliest, front plow that welding and testosterone can produce. A true Mad Max level creation of scrap metal and experimentation! It’s a sight to behold. As soon as I saw the photo I asked for a guest post.

Please give a warm welcome to MaxDamage!]

Of Shops, Men of Iron, Machines of Steel, By MaxDamage:

There was a time, not so long ago, when men made things. We worked with our hands, we spent the days in factories and fields and the evenings repairing, building, tinkering. We had more time than money, entertainment was saved for the weekend, and we took pride in what we created.

Unless it was the Gremlin. I’m not certain anybody ever had any pride regarding the Gremlin. [Editor’s note. No living being ever had pride in a Gremlin. This is a scientific fact. Today is a tractor day! Let us speak no more of the mechanical disaster that is a Gremlin.]

A/C talking about his tractor, his shop, and building things of wood reminded me of my grandfather and my Ferguson TE-20. Or, to borrow a phrase from a friend, “20 hp of welded steel and sex appeal.”

Not even My Good Wife can keep a straight face when I say that.

It was Dad’s tractor, but he died young. I inherited it. It’s the same as the little Fordson’s you’ll still see every now and again. 4-speed gearbox, three-point, 4-cylinder OHV gas motor, and that’s about it. It was designed to replace two horses in 1949, and that’s about what it could do. There were various attachments for the 3-point, none of them very useful in snow, so the thought came about, “Well, couldn’t we build something?” We had a shop, we had an iron pile, we had a welder. More specifically, the welder was my grandfather, who had spent the previous 50 years at the task welding Liberty Ships in the Kaiser shipyards, landing craft in Leavenworth, dams up and down the Missouri, ships and barges in Kansas City, and everything in between.

In the Olde Days, the shop was where we hung out, learning the Ways of Men from our elders. When the supper table was cleared men didn’t retire to the living room and read the paper, they repaired (Heh! See what I did there?) to the shop and built value from sweat and ingenuity.

So we did some sketching, some measuring, a little calculating, a lot of cutting and drilling, and Grandpa corrected me (a lot!) along the way and turned my tacks into solid welds. Some 4″ x 1/4″ angle iron became some frame rails. 3″ x 1/4″ tubing became the arms. 1/4″ flat-iron the loader arms, 1/8″ flat iron the mounts. Took a little fabrication to get a pump mounted to the crankshaft pulley, a bit more to mount the reservoir and remote. The cylinders are 2-way, I can drop them on the plow and lift the front end off if I need to cut hardpack. A steel snowplow off a city truck became my front plow, once mounts were fabricated. The rear blade is from a horse-drawn road grader, flat iron, and an entire can of welding rod. Those arms to the front hold a steel bucket, with a cylinder that works to tip and recover. I take the bucket off when using the plow, the extra weight makes it really difficult to steer. Everything can be added and removed by one man using simple pins and locks or a pipe wrench.

Didn’t calculate everything right, though. Flat iron and re-rod were needed as cantilevers on the arms to keep them from bending beyond recovery. Also had to craft in a reinforced front axle, once the arms stopped bending. I offered to show Grandpa my figures and why that shouldn’t have happened, but he just shook his head in that tired, resigned way Men Who Build have for engineers with their pocket protectors and slide rules and silly notions of the way things should behave. Did I mention I spent 7 years in college? He reminded me of that. A few times.

As you can see from the photo, it’s some mis-matched parts with all the grace and charm of a Russian weightlifter and the color coordination of a TV Preacher’s wife. Paint was whatever I had lying around, the goal is to keep it simple, reliable, and cheap. Until now, nobody’s seen it unless they went past my driveway after a blizzard. But the blade turns, the motor starts at -35, the snow gets moved, and all it cost us was about a ton of scrap steel, a whole lot of welding rod, and a month or so in the shop. Still more useful than any number of evenings watching TV. And we built something. Together. Out of steel.

When you screw up with wood you can burn it to keep yourself warm and hide the evidence. When you screw up in steel it’s there for all posterity to see.

Some day my son will inherit these 20 hp of welded steel and sex appeal. And, some day, something will require attention, and I’m absolutely sure he’ll look at it and say aloud, “What in the *hell* were they thinking?” I only hope I’m alive to tell him it seemed like a good idea at the time.

– Max