THE CLASSIC TRACTOR

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One old-timer I met, now retired, bought two 8Ns new in 1948, and he used them to farm 350 acres of cotton, chiles, lettuce, onions and a grove of pecans. In season, his 8Ns would run 12 hours a day, five days a week. Saturdays, he washed and serviced them. He used just those two 8Ns for decades, until, as far as he was concerned, they were hopelessly worn and outdated, so he "traded up" to larger, diesel powered machines.

THE LARGER TRACTORS, he said, made the work faster, but that, as far as he was concerned, was their only advantage. The 8N, he added, will bum a gallon of gas an hour, and it will only have to be refueled about every eight hours. He said he could cultivate 25 acres of cotton in 12 hours with one. The 8N is not an antique of limited utility; it can do the same amount of work, the same kind of work, that any modern tractor can do.

Where I live, for instance, most of the land is irrigable, and except for large farms, most of it is held by families who have two- to five-acre spreads—places where a small, gasoline-powered tractor works quite nicely. Because some crops require more water than others, fields are separated by borders raised by "border discs." Cutting a border requires more tractor guts than most two-acre farmers ever need otherwise, but the N-series tractors raise them with ease. The 8N may be old, but it holds its own. Despite its age, I'm convinced the 8N is all the tractor that most part-time farmers will ever need.

Like its older sister, the Ford Model A car, the 8N was built to be an everyman's vehicle: inexpensive, and simple enough to be maintained by the owner. (Ford used to send along a packet of tools with every car it sold.)

The Model A comparison is even more apt, in fact, because the 8N's four-cylinder L-head engine is essentially a Model A engine. The design goes back at least 75 years and is just about as simple as a four-cycle engine can get. If you think you can master a few of the automotive secrets of the first 30 years of the Motor Age, you should be able to restore and maintain an 8N all by yourself.

The 8N engine is better-built than the Model A engine in a few respects: The block is heavier (which helps to dissipate heat better, and it has more displacement (giving more power. More significant, the cylinders are sleeved: lined with a metal cylinder, so the sleeves wear out rather than the block. During a major overhaul, worn sleeves are knocked out and replaced by new ones. Voila! New engine. Well, you also have to remember to grind the valves, put in new piston rings and replace the bearings. Which means you have to find the parts. Since Harry Truman was president in the years the 8N was built, and since I'm starting to remember those years in black and white and shades of gray, I wondered at first: Are parts available?

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