The Fordson Tractor Pages Forum

Hi Brian and all. How many New Majors would have had the pressed bolt on front wheels in comparison to the cast wheels. Were the pressed wheels the same as the Ford Customline car or the Ford Mainline Utility that was available in Australia. Also What hubs did they use and were they the same as the Dexters. Best regards - Michael

Micheal,

The steel wheels where an optional extra here in England so most Majors went out with the cast versions. It was not until the New Performance in 1963 that the steel ones became the norm.

Unless wheel weights were fitted to cars then the wheels would not be the same as all Major wheels have holes for the bolt on weights here.

The wheels were made by Sankey and were common to nearly all British made tractors. I can change the 6.00 x 16 wheels on Nuffy with the ones on Dotty or Harriet. they are all the same with minor differences such as round weight holes or square ones.

I understand that Ford did not export the wheels with tractors going to Aus and most of the tractors over there were fitted with locally made ones.

All of the Majors that I've seen over here have steel front wheels. I wonder if they were shipped to the US without wheels, too. Maybe the tractors were lighter to ship with steel instead of cast.

I have steel wheels on mine.
I'm fixing to blast them and repaint before I replace the tires.

I took the front wheels off yesterday and noticed I had HEAVY wheel weights on the inside front wheels.
Also have them on the rear wheels.

Brian,

When the new FM was first layed out, were the cast wheels found to be optimal as far as work was concerned, or were cast wheels just easier and cheaper to make?

Here in Canada you mainly see pressed wheels, and mine came with the wheel-weights.
I took them out, figuring I didn't need to be carting all the weight about, but found she's a bit light on for some jobs so they went back!
I'm not sorry this one has the pressed rims, as 7-50 X16 is easy to find.

Richard.

I think the idea of cast wheels came from the E27N Majors but they, or weights are needed if you use the hydraulics a lot.

The cast wheels were made "in house" at the foundry at Dagenham, pressed wheels would need to be bought in from Sankey.

Another reason perhaps.

Thanks Brian, for the reply.

Speaking of cast in-house wheels, what amazes me is the way the Dagenham plant put things together so quickly.
They didn't just cast up one part at a time, but must have been casting and building tractors with more or less no backlog.
I have two FSM's one built in Feb, 1961, and one in April '61.

All the bits for the Feb. tractor were cast between Feb, 8th and Feb.14th

The other one also had all castings marked within a week.

I don't know if you'd see this efficiency now!.....

Hope this is not too OT.

Richard.

In the 1980's I was working regularly on the Dagenham site.

The foundry was being knocked down and I was involved in training ex-foundry staff to drive diggers and loading shovels as well as tractors in the car factory. They had a series of 3610 tractors and little trains of four wheel trailers that were used to collect packaging rubbish from the production lines.

Training people who had never driven tractors before to reverse four wheel trailers around the massive support pillars in a 1930/1940's factory was quite an experience.

The foundry used to cast everything that Ford needed for the cars, trucks and tractors that were built on the Dagenham site and elsewhere. The moving of tractor production to Basildon spelt the end of the foundry as more and more castings were bought in and it became "un-economic" to make things in-house.

It was the era of diversification, but, looking back with hindsight, the US management, with all their ideas about profitability, destroyed a once great company that produced cars, trucks and tractors and went a long way to keeping design, development and manufacturing industries in this country.

Ford were not alone in that, but, in those years, they were the leaders in the industry. Where they lead, others followed.

As I have written before, companies like J.J.Wright and Sons used to machine cast components for Ford and also used to spread machining jobs around the local area, to companies who were small and specialised in one job. So when Fords foundry closed it had far reaching effects that stretched as far as Norfolk.

The T-Ford line in US was an inhouse production as far as it can go. They feed in iron ore i one end and out came T-Fords in the other end.

Brian,
Grani,

It still boggles my mind, how in its hey-day, Dagenham was producing more tractors than all the other companies combined!...And building cars an trucks as well!


It truly is a B----- shame, the way it went.
Sorry I can't put it any better, but what a b..... shame.. all that industry lost!

RH wrote:Brian,
Grani,

It still boggles my mind, how in its hey-day, Dagenham was producing more tractors than all the other companies combined!...And building cars an trucks as well!


It truly is a B----- shame, the way it went.
Sorry I can't put it any better, but what a b..... shame.. all that industry lost!

We then have a wery important hobby in precerving this treasure for the future to our children to admire.

Brian wrote:The wheels were made by Sankey and were common to nearly all British made tractors. I can change the 6.00 x 16 wheels on Nuffy with the ones on Dotty or Harriet. They are all the same with minor differences such as round weight holes or square ones.

Brian,
Is there such a thing as an 'original' Dexta wheel with square weight holes, or were they fitted with 'generic' tractor wheels .... made by Sankey?
Also I notice that front wheels with round weight holes have extra hub nut holes too - why was that?
Thanks,
Ben