Friday, March 27, 2020
Standard Motor Car help for Ferguson
I recently received a copy of the book “THE BOOK OF THE STANDARD MOTOR CAR COMPANY” by Graham Robson. ISBN 978-1-845843-43-4 www.veloce.co.uk
I bought the book because the exact nature of the Ferguson tractor building effort by Standard is not well known in the US.
Coventry itself is fascinating due to its involvement with the Enigma machine decoding. At some point in WW2 a Luftwaffe bombing of the city’s Shadow Factories took place with only token opposition because a strong defensive reaction would have revealed that the Enigma code had been broken.
Through an antique tractor email group, I became aware that the Standard 23C 4 cylinder diesel engine had been used in US built Ferguson TO-35s in the later fifties.
Looking at the relationship between Ferguson and Standard it looks like Standard filled in some of the gaps in tractor design that the Ferguson design team lacked in order to make a go of the TE-20 tractor which is what really made Ferguson.
Ferguson did not have drawings for the differential casting/housing, the transmission, or the engine mounting when they approached Standard. I am guessing Ford and before that Brown had kept those to themselves.
A fellow I used to interact with through lean circles lent me a book which emphasized that in the early fifties Standard had the world’s most efficient auto assembly plant. Ferguson made a great choice.
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