Here we are hearking back to the old days!  Our first combine hervester was a Massey-Harris 726 bagger model.  Most of our early combines were baggers and not tankers.  The baggers dropped the  bags off in groups of 3-4 . These were then manually collected as shown here and transported back to the farmstead where they would be put on an in sack dryer if necessary or stored on the floor or in the lofts of farm buildings.  All manual hard work as shown here with my Dad on the right and George Kelly who worked for him on the left. In the extreme left can be seen the bag chute of the combine down which the filled bags were slid to the ground.  Could todays combine men cope with this sort of labour?  Would/could they give up ther sanitised air conditioned cabs for operating on top of the very dusty machines of old.  I doubt it! Are there men around today who would succumb to this type of hard labour which in the day no-one thought anything of and certainly never complained.

The 726 combine was eventually replaced with an MF 780 special tanker model.

John

Sorry - forgot the photo!!

Sorry - forgot the photo!!

My uncle's E1AN Fordson Mjor diesel tractor fitted with MIL loader and Winsam cab.  Note the wheel strakes fitted to the rear wheels.  The strakes are extended out to give added grip when plughing on heavy clay land.  The Fordson Majors were good, reliable, solid lugging tractors but lacked Ferguson system type hydraulics so were inferior but cheaper than comparable MF 65 tractors of the same era.  They were excellent sttarters in cold weather and fitted with an extraordinarily heavy 12 volt batterey maybe 100+ pounds in weight.
John

This is my Dad and uncle's Massey Ferguson 780 Special combine powered by an Austin 6 cy,inder petrol/paraffin engine.  It replaced their previous MH 726 combine.  It was bought as a bagger but they purchased a new tanker unit to replace it.  In this photo it has just been fitted and the old bagger unit can be seen on the floor at the front of the combine.  Note also that cage wheels have been fitted in advance of it proceeding to work on our peat moss farm about 3 miles away from the home farm.  These gave it amazing flotation on the peat.
John

The MF 780 combine photo didn't attach so here it is!

i have now exhausted my Family Tractor archives with these last two photos.  " Jack" Eccleston who you see in both these photos worked for my Dad from leaving school for about 30 years.  Here you see him on my Dad's grey Ferguson TEA 20 tractor when he was reunited with it at my farm here in N Wales when both were well into retirement in about 2000.  I showed this tractor in the first photo of this thread.  He drove this tractor for hundreds of hours - ploughing, cultivating, ridging, harrowing, rolling, discing, inter row weeding, spraying, hauling wagons and more.  The second photo is an early red MF 35 with 4 cylinder  Standard diesel engine again driven by "Jack" in about 1958-1959.  Dad bought it second hand at about 2-3 years old.  It was the first diesel tractor that we ever had and quite a learning exercise after coil or magneto engine tractors.  These photos of "Jack" bring back many, many fond memories - he was 10 years older than me and like an elder brother.  This picture of the red MF 35 is taken in one of our fields which was across a raod from the UK MF Central Parts Operation which you can just about see in the background.  Just further up the raod was the UK Massey-Harris factory, later MF.

So I am signing off living in the hope that some of you will, sometime, find some more FAMILY TRACTOR photos - there must be some!!!!

John

Again the phot did not attach so trying again!