Things I learnt in the first three weeks

I had meant to do a summary post each week of my magazine.  Obviously, that hasn't happened.  I'd love to promise it won't happen again, but as the mother of a small child, a PhD student returning from leave, and a hopeless procrastinator - that's a promise that's made to be broken.

(Of these three, it's really the last one that's the issue.  But I like to try and justify it somehow.)

So while I can't promise this with any great scheduled regularity, I will try.  For my first two magazines I have learnt:

• There's a lot more to tractors than I had thought.
• There's about as much depth of journalistic investigative writing in a shopping magazine for kids as I had thought.
• Even I, who broke my intention to have a "frugal baby" within about 2 seconds of falling pregnant, have my limits from the "aww that's cute" to the "holy mother of batman that is ridiculous" and those limits are way way before the $1600 family death trap - I mean family bucket bike.
• Going to the Murrambateman field day and recognising the difference between the Massey Fergusons and the John Deeres makes me feel like I fit in.
• The number one difference between Massey Fergusons and John Deeres that I know is one type is red and the other green.  I said I felt like I fit in, not that I actually did.
• And finally -  babies and baby tractors?  A winning combination.

New magazine tomorrow - it's been bought and it's a ripper.  Never before have I felt slightly ashamed to be buying a magazine...   (And no, it wasn't in a brown paper cover.)

The problem with toy shops

Well, we didn't build a tractor.

We did however visit the shops, and Toby managed to communicate his approval of the week's theme.

While we managed not to come home with one of the big ones, I am currently looking at a John Deere dual wheeled mini tractor that is not in the shop any more, but rather here on my desk next to me.

I wonder if Toby will do so well out of next week's magazine.... 

You're never to old to have fun in a field.

One of the things that has struck me from reading Classic Tractor is how people enjoy their passions - whether those passions are knitting, reading, gardening, cooking, playing sports, taking nature walks, or, say - tractors.

For a yarn-o-phile such as myself, the Alpaca tent at the Murrambateman Field Day is my idea of a great day out.  There's fleece a plenty, interesting people, cool animals and of course, yarn. Now I think of it, my dedication to the Alpaca tent may be why I haven't learnt much about tractors at the Field Day yet. 

For other people, a great day out also involves a field.  But instead of alpacas, substitute in three Massey-Ferguson tractors, a tractor trailer, big bags of fertiliser (1000kg of big) and a little device called a Pressure Control system.

Basically a Pressure Control system is coupler and chain that loops around a trailer's drawbar, and works to increase the traction of the tractor.  Apparently the device never really caught on in the tractor set: Classic Tractor laments that "many farmers viewed it as a gimmick".  Never one to be deterred by trends or popularity though, Classic Tractor decided to test out how well the system actually worked.

Now, to be fair, they had a pretty thorough system of testing worked out.  They used three different tractors, each with different pulling power.  The tractors were tested first without the pressure system, and the wheel slip was measured.  The tractor was then fitted with the Pressure Control system and the wheel slip was remeasured, over the same course.

The results were pretty impressive - the MF 165 had a 33% wheel slip without the system and 8.4 tonnes of fertiliser.   With the system, and front weights on the tractor, the wheel slip was only 16% for a 10.8 tonne load.  (That's a lot of fertiliser.)  All very serious stuff, and valuable information.

Still, as I read the article I see:

A lot of people standing around in a field very intently watching a tractor:

A tractor doing a wheelie:

(The text in the article was "All four former MF employees warned us that Pressure Control wouldn't work without front weights attached.  They were right, as this picture demonstrates.")

And four very happy looking farmers at the end of the day:

And I suspect this whole thing was less about the impressive percentages and more about being out in a field with some tractors, some fertiliser and generally having a Good Day Out.   And there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

Weird Ad Wednesday...

...because alliteration is my friend.

With niche magazines comes niche advertising.  Most of the ads in Classic Tractor are normal enough.  A little tractor orientated, but that's hardly surprising.  I now know where to go for my topper and slurry pump gearboxes, my tractor paint, my luxury tractor suspension seats and my tractor dismantling.  Most of the ads are pretty straight forward - they display the product, and they tell you where to get it.

One ad though went the extra mile.  The message itself is clear - use only Massey Ferguson genuine parts in your Massey Ferguson genuine tractor, or you'll void your new tractor warranty - uh, maybe the last bit only applies to cars.  But you get the idea.  How though, to get this message to stand out?  How to attract the attention of the weary farmer, in from a long day tractoring his (or her) fields?  Well, kids are always cute.  Everyone loves kids.  And go-carts. And sombreros!  Who doesn't love a sombrero?  When could the combination of a kid, a go-cart and a sombrero ever be wrong?

When the kid doesn't know the difference between a sombrero and a wheel, that's when.

Maybe I'm being too harsh.   Maybe this is one of those pinewood derby type things, where the kid is meant to do the work but really his parents have done it all for him.  Maybe the pointing and tongue out combination is really saying "Hey, Dad - that's not a wheel.  Dad?  Dad?  Stop breathing in the tractor paint, Dad...".   Yeah, I think Dad needs to spend less time out in the field and more time on basic object recognition skills.

This ad also makes me want to see the sequel.  I mean, we're told that he'll regret it - but where's the proof?  I want the  shots of the go-cart hurtling down a hill on three wheels, the multi-coloured sombrero drifting down in the breeze after it.  I want commitment to my weird ads, gosh darn it!

Making hay while the sun shines

I was going to do an indepth expose on the use of grub screws in tractors, but as I studied Classic Tractor something else caught my eye.

When I was a little kid, I was fascinated by miniature stuff.  Dolls-house furniture, dolls clothes, lilliputian books.  My favourite was a set of miniature groceries that my cousin had - teeny boxes of cereal, little plastic loaves of bread, itty-bitty tins of spam.  I coveted the tiny groceries fiercely, and would insist on playing with them every time I visited.

Just imagine then, my longing, had I known that as well as stocking and restocking the (miniature) shelves of my imaginary (miniature) supermarket, I could have been making imaginary (miniature) hay as well!*

Above are, and I quote, the toys that "heralded a new era in Britains' miniature hay-making operations".  We're not just dealing with a few pieces of plastic and metal - it's a national operation.  Miniature hay making is serious business.  (Actually, the name of manufacturer is Britains.  Hence the apostrophe placement in the quote.  I prefer to ignore this fact, and imagine the entire British Isles in the 1960s dedicating itself to miniature hay making.)

Now, the astute reader will realise that the bales (yes, the miniature hay makers came with their own miniature hay bales.  My 6 year old self is green with envy.) in the Bamfords BL58 haymaker (2 & 2A above) are transported through the model by way of a driven rubber band.  Clearly Britains were a bit behind the eight ball on this one, but luckily they released a new teeny hay maker in 1978 with a new system.

Introducing the New Holland 376!  I am reliably informed by Classic Tractor that in this model "two driven plastic reciprocating strips in the bale chamber 'walked' the bales out of the baler as it was being pulled along the floor."

But even the New Holland had its design flaws (hard to believe, I know): "Although the sledge didn't arrange the bales into a flat-eight formation, like the real machines, Britains did provide a front-loader with a flat-eight grab attachment to move them.  There was a still an element of manual handling before the grab attachment could pick up the bales..."  

Dreadful, isn't it, when you need to manually handle your little plastic bales of hay before the grab attachment can pick them up?

*The real trick is finding the miniature horses to eat all your miniature hay.

Magazine Monday - It's Classic Tractor!

The first magazine to kick us off – Classic Tractor.

I don’t know much about tractors.  I live in Australia, which has quite a few farms.  I live in Canberra, which is basically a country town, so near quite a few farms.  I regularly see tractors in the nearby farms.  More than this, we go out to the Murrambateman field day every year, which is like the Royal Show  (State Fair, for the international visitors) crossed with a tractor meet.  Unsuprisingly, there are tractors there.  Big, shiny tractors.  We walk around them, marvel at the size (and the shininess) and then walk off to join the queue for the cold drinks/hot food/portaloo, (the queue for the drinks or food depends on the temperature.  There’s always a queue for the portaloos) having learnt nothing more about tractors.

So, equipped with my magazine, which I chose primarily because of the pretty red tractors in the pretty flower field, I figured I should do some preliminary research.  Google it!

Tractors has about 25,800 000 hits, while Classic Tractor has only 727 000.  Clearly, we’re dealing with a sub-genre here.  In a google fight it loses miserably to classic cars, classic movies  and classic music.  I’m starting to feel bad for poor old Classic Tractor.   To give it a better chance, I decide to pit the agricultural wonder of industrial revolution against its forebears.    Yes!  Against the classic plow, the classic plow horse and even the classic oxen the classic tractor finally comes into its own.  (Though the classic oxen did put up a good fight.)

Reading through Classic Tractor, it's clear I have a bit of learning to do.  I've worked out that MF stands for Massey Ferguson, but why this brand is so dominant I don't know.  The magazine is part mechanics (grub screws are mentioned quite a bit), part aesthetics (a kitchen spray bottle and washing up liquid can make all the difference in applying decals to your tractor) and part collectors paradise.  I need more coffee to get my head around what a grub screw actually does, but I have learnt something from the magazine already.

Tractors - even Classic Tractors - are expensive.

This is a used, refurbished tractor.  It was made in 1968, purchased for around 1300 pounds, and driven for thousands of hours.  When it stopped working in 2003, it was stripped down, repaired and refurbished.  Then in May of this year, it sold again for 11, 800 pounds.  That's over $21 700 in Australian money ($18 800 USD) - more than our car!  For a tractor that's over 40 years old, has been used full time on a farm, and has already stopped working once.  Guess Tony won't be getting a vintage tractor for Christmas after all.