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Ford 9n tractor

mrk5

mrk5

The Sticker Guy
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Been looking to pick up a little Ford 9n for a while now and I ended getting one at an auction. It's far from perfect, but it runs good. I know me and how my thoughts are running already, I'm gonna need a build thread.

First 2 major things will be getting the 3-point to work and it will need a 12 volt conversion. It needs the 12v because it already has a 12v battery but nothing else has been changed which means it's not charging and the points are getting more voltage than they should. The 3-point is likely an easy fix, it's very common for the valve to stick. Also gonna need to find some better rear tires.

Beyond that I'd like to pick up a couple implements for it, a blade and an auger. I also want to make a few accessories for it myself.


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Now this is my post to really geek out about this tractor. I'll admit that until I bought this, I didn't know a lot about them. For one thing I knew they were old, like maybe 60's era, but then I found out the 9n was made from 1939 to 1942! Way older than I thought.

A while back I watched a neat video about Harry Ferguson, the Ferguson in Massey Ferguson. I didn't know how much of an impact he'd had on tractor development. Plus he did a lot of other cool things like flying the earliest airplanes and racing cars.

Ferguson was developing tractors around the end of WWI and one of the problems was they were killing farmers. The plows would hit a big rock in the field and it would cause the front of the tractor to raise up and in many cases flip the tractor over on the driver. To combat this issue Ferguson came up with the 3-point hitch design. The same design that's still used today.

Ford also wanted to get into tractors but he wasn't having much success. Ferguson wanted to expand the market for his 3-point hitch so he decided to approach Henry Ford with the idea. At the end of their meeting, the 2 had made a handshake deal. Ferguson would design the tractors using the 3-point hitch and Ford would build and distribute them.

What I didn't know until this weekend was that the 9n tractor I had just bought was the very tractor that came out of the agreement between Ferguson and Ford! Now the geek side of me is even more excited about having one of these tractors.

Here's the video about Harry Ferguson for anyone interested:
 
TerryD said:
They make Flat Head V8 adapters for those..... just saying.
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They make V8 adapters for almost any old tractor. My old man put a Mopar big block 383 into a farmall M
 
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The cheapest 6v group 1 battery I found is gonna cost $120. Yesterday's Tractors sells a complete conversion kit for $155. That gives me the benefits of 12 volt as far as starting and lighting. I'm also worried the way way it's wired now might have messed up the generator.

Aside from that I was debating about keeping the 6v. It's also positive ground.
 
mrk5 said:
Yikes!

I was driving around the yard in 3rd gear, the highest gear, and I can't see why anyone would want to go any faster than that in one of these tractors.
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It's not about speed.
Look up "tractor pulling" on you tube and get back to us.
Lol.


That black tractor was just built as a Sema showpiece
 
Tractor pulling is my favorite motorsport to watch. Didn't even occur to me that tractor was set up for that idea.
 
I Bushhog in 3rd with my 8n in the open pasture. Get’r Done. Has 4 gears though.
 
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Figured it would be like riding a bucking horse..
 
I realized this was still wired for positive ground. I found an inexpensive 6 volt battery at Murdochs, $70 with core charge since I don't have one to trade.

It runs but what voltage should I expect to see if it's charging. On the test idling it was 6.36V and stayed the same when I shut it off. Should I expect 6v system to just maintain voltage?
 
6.30s is just about right.
I think your only looking at close to 7 to 7.5 volts from the generator at best. I'd say it's probably pretty close to where you need to be.
But it been a long time since we had any 6 volt tractors. So I could be mistaken.

What's it read with the throttle up?
 
I didn't think to try changing the idle until I'd put everything away. I think the best might be to see what it does the next time I use it around the yard again.

I'm on the hunt for a 3-point blade so I can start working on cleaning up the drainage around our shop yard. There are a couple of farm auctions coming up I'm hoping to score one.
 
Picked up a couple implements at an auction.

blade1.jpeg

blade2.jpeg

3pt boom pole.jpeg

Paid $250 for both. Gonna use the blade to clean up the drainage in the shop lot. The boom pole I thought might come in handy for moving some stuff around.

Figured I'd put the tractor to work unloading the implements.

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Unfortunately the battery isn't charging. I had the throw the 12v battery in to finish unloading.
 
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