Geoff Ravenhall

Thomas coming out?? Have you discussed this with your wife?

….or did he come out and has now gone back in? Oh dear, I feel one of my headaches coming on again!

Charlie Moore is the expert on these machines and I’m sure he’ll be in touch soon.

Well done on getting it for such a low bid.

Hi, Dave,
Please pass on the committee’s gratitude to Dave Weeley for opening up his place again for next year’s event. It takes a lot of organising and it must have been a big decision to open up his farm to so many people during these Covid blighted days. Let’s hope next year will have seen the last of the lockdowns and everything will start to…[Read more]

When I first started the Trusty Register I used the JAP engine dates to give a rough idea of age but you have to be careful that the machine hasn’t had a replacement engine during it’s lifetime.

In the absence of accurate factory records it does help to make a collection of all known machine serial numbers, list them in numerical order and…[Read more]

Proof positive at last that Thomas is partial to Chinese take-aways!

Well done Alan for another edition of The Cultivator. It is the only publication available in this country solely dedicated to “our” machinery.

When I used to repair Kubota tractors, and later moved on to selling them, I asked the Kubota demonstrator about date codes. Things like clutches and brakes were stamped in ink with a date code (which is why I asked in the first place) but the calendar that the Japanese used at the time was not the same as ours and I forget how to convert it.…[Read more]

The Safety Reverse version of the single speed tractor was built on the production line as such. It is possible to convert a single speed tractor but you will need the Safety Reverse gearbox which has both dog clutches inside it as well as the forward and reverse gears. As you will know already the single speed tractor has no gearbox at all, just…[Read more]

Your Trusty Steed is a Mk2; NTS stands for “New Trusty Steed”.

No. 225 was sold to K.L.Distributors, the Australian importers, on 17th January, 1952 and was fitted with a Norton Big Four engine, 600cc side valve with engine number 32KK.

If you post some pictures of it here I may be able to tell you more by looking at it.

Best of luck with it.

That’s alright, Big Ears, I’ll have to have a shave before I appear in public next time!

The lorry crane division is their most lucrative side and is always very busy. T.H.White have the sole franchise in Britain to sell Palfinger cranes and they have a factory site in Bradford as well as Devizes to mount the cranes onto lorry chassis. Recently they also started building the lorry bodies as well instead of sending them off to have…[Read more]

You’ll find that the professional ride-on mowers changed from dark green to red some years ago (some time around 2015) and were badged up as Toro from then onwards and sold alongside their golf course product line. Does this announcement mean that the domestic range will now appear in red with Toro badges as well?

Where in the country are you based?

You are partly correct- T.H.White’s main headquarters is in Devizes but the Automower works they took over was in Vallis Road, Frome and T.H.White traded from the premises for a long time after acquiring Automower. It is now closed and the depot has moved out of town to a new site at Marston.

Years ago I saw an old training film made by Briggs and Stratton about an on-site mechanic who couldn’t get a cement mixer going. He was getting it in the neck from all sides and couldn’t find the problem; it turned out eventually to be a faulty spark plug which he had overlooked.

Be methodical, start at one end and make sure the part that…[Read more]

I guessed that Guiness would figure somewhere in the story!

To find these gems you must have a sixth sense- it’s either that or those big ears! Keep looking, Andrew, you never know what’s around the next corner.

It’s good to see that somebody is still looking out for these old machines. Quite often what happens in the collecting world is that people collect for nostalgia- what was the first tractor/car/mower/etc. that you drove? This means that the relative age of the collected machinery gets newer as time goes on. We’ve already seen that with the classic…[Read more]

That’s the one, Charlie! Well done, I knew it was worth asking The Forum- you’ve never been beaten yet!

I knew it was from Lee Howl Ltd. of Tipton in The Black Country but could not find any pictures relating to this particular pump. Surprising that it was from 1939; it looks older.

The emblem on the cover is almost rubbed out on mine so I will need to find a way of reproducing it. The photo of the good emblem is a pump belonging to a fellow member but it appears that the logo is embossed or moulded into the plastic on his one, so not quite the same although the artwork is similar.

Any ideas, anybody??

For comparison purposes here are some photo’s of the pump with a different perspex cover or different layouts.

Decisions, decisions! Now I don’t know which way to go with it!