There are few that would argue about the impact that the Ferguson TE-20 had on mechanised agriculture, and although the Massey Ferguson 1200 cannot be held in such high regard, it deserves recognition for the effect it had on the way tractors were perceived in Great Britain.
Where once the Fordson had reigned supreme, the Ferguson System altered the way tractors increased productivity, and it was the interaction between prime mover and implement that changed farming forever.
Naturally, productivity had to increase, and so the need for more power and greater traction led both farmers and tractor manufacturers to come up with innovative solutions to meet the needs of progressive agriculture. The Doe Dual Drive is a great example of such innovation – with Essex farmer George Pryor joining two Fordson Majors together to create a powerful, four-wheel drive ‘tandem’ tractor, before the concept was put into production by dealer Ernest Doe & Sons in the late 1950s.
Specialist conversion companies, like County Commercial Cars, Four Wheel Traction, and Roadless Traction, had a hand in improving productivity by taking existing models and adding driven front axles, but during the 1960s Britain’s tractor manufacturers had refrained from offering a tractor that had been designed to have four driven wheels from the moment pen was put to paper on the drawing board.
Driven front axles with smaller front wheels had illustrated their worth, but the four-wheel drive tractors produced with equal-sized wheels throughout the 1960s had proved their superiority. Conversions to Ford, IH and Nuffield models, by the likes of County and Bray, showed what a difference such technology could make to a four-cylinder tractor, but those using six-cylinder engines took output to new levels, including Muir-Hill.
Massey Ferguson tractors had been equipped with front axle conversion kits, most notably by Four Wheel Traction Ltd. of London, but the marque had largely been left behind in this respect and what it needed was a model to make the agricultural community sit up and take note.
Until this point Massey Ferguson tractors had been relatively light, yet reasonably powerful machines, relying on the weight transferred from mounted implements to provide them with sufficient traction in all conditions. The introduction of Pressure Control enabled the principles to be extended to trailed implements, but weight transfer remained critical as there was a requirement to load the rear wheels of a two-wheel drive tractor when in work.
Since the front wheels were required for steering and stability, rather than traction, it was not necessary to have copious amounts of weight over the front axle and the position of said axle influenced how much weight was transferred to the rear axle when an implement was attached.
Let’s take the MF 165 is an example, as Massey Ferguson did in a publication aimed at explaining traction. Weighing in at around 4,400lb (1,995kg), roughly 1,800lb (816kg) of weight is on the front axle and 2,600lb (1,179kg) on the rear axle. This static weight distribution changes when an implement is mounted on the three-point linkage, as an 800lb (363kg) four-furrow conventional plough will add 1,400lb (635kg) to the rear of the tractor – with 600lb (272kg) coming from the front of the tractor
