Ford Tractors N-News »
The Magazine for the Ford Tractor Enthusiast
There is always a story.
The short version is I fell in love with figuring out how things worked around age eight. I loved taking stuff apart. Old lawnmowers, lawn tractors, toasters, phones. I would flip through parts manuals just to look at 1950s era exploded drawings. I loved looking at my father’s 1965 Gray’s Anatomy textbook to try and understand how the human body worked. Photography came with Brownies, 35mm cameras, an amazing 1940s era Graflex Speed Graphic camera (two different shutters and three viewing methods), enlargers, etc. I loved all of it. And then there were motorcycles and tractors.
My uncle pulled a 1951 Ford 8N off a junk pile with one of his high school students. It had been in a fire and needed attention. He got it for nothing. By the time I was 10 he had owned it for a handful of years. When my father and uncle were working at my grandparent’s house, they would have me drive the tractor while they loaded and unloaded stones for rock walls. I learned to drive on that 8N. My uncle realized the Ford N-series held a significant place in agricultural history.
In 1939, Henry Ford and Harry Ferguson made a deal. The three-point hitch that Ferguson and his design team created would be truly put into production with Henry Ford. That three-point hitch became the industry standard for agricultural implements. A brand new John Deere or Kubota tractor you purchase today has nearly the exact same hitch on the back.
A handful of years later my uncle had gotten an IBM PC with dual floppy disk drives and was looking for projects to do with it. So he started a little newsletter. He put up fliers at the local Ford Tractor dealer. Before he knew it, he had 50 subscribers, then 200. It kept growing. I helped. I helped repair the tractor, I helped work on the computer, I took photos of Ford tractors I saw in my travels. In 1998 I purchased the magazine from my uncle and it became my fulltime job along with a few other side gigs. Here is a link to the N-News website. You probably need to subscribe because you need one of these great old tractors. And if you don’t need one, you could dream of one, which is cheaper, it only cost a year’s subscription.