Our regular readers may remember engineer Sam from Melksham in Wiltshire. He took the rusting remains of a Diamond T 980 which we had personally known as a working tank transporter back in the 1960s, when 20 YZ 65 was one of two DTs which made up the tank transporting contingent for the Territorial Army in Gateshead.
Sam finished its restoration at the end of December 2020. Since then, a serious injector fault gave Sam a few problems during 2021, the year of the pandemic, so the DT spent a good deal of that year laid up, awaiting a solution. It turned out that a supplier hadn’t cleaned the pump correctly which led to a serious failure within the fuel supply. Eventually, a new pump was found and correctly calibrated for its new home. Even though Sam runs two busy family engineering businesses, he eventually found the time to drag the second part of his three-part project out of its hangar in January 2022.
The Diamond T 980/981 tractor was conceived from a request by the British for a design of this type, a demand taken up by The Diamond T company of Chicago, before the USAs direct involvement in the world war.
