David Brown 880 SELECTAMATIC Restoration
Looking at my articles, readers might be mistaken in thinking that all of us who collect old tractors in Britain are scruffy beggars. This simply isn’t true. It just happens to be the case that many of my family members whom I write about tend to have unrestored tractors.
It seems that we as a family are quite good at getting old tractors running, but we lack the patience and skill involved in producing a perfect finish when it comes to paintwork. We tend to wipe our tractors over with an oily rag and leave it at that. I’ve personally always been of the opinion that unless you are going to do a really top class job at painting a tractor, it is better to leave it well alone, as it is all too easy to devalue and spoil an old tractor by getting too enthusiastic with the paintbrush.
Raising the restoration bar
The unrestored look, complete with rust and dents, isn’t something that tractor enthusiast and all-round perfectionist and Welshman Geraint Jones could even begin to entertain. We all buy old tractors for different reasons, and the reason Geraint bought his 1967 David Brown Selectamatic 880 was to restore it to a high level and then to show it.
