Old Pond publishing days

Modern Tractors DVD - more information

We gave some advance information about this Tractor Barn programme in the blog of 28 August.

Jonathan Whitlam and Stephen Richmond have now come up with some further information. The first change is that what they intended as a single programme will now be two. Part 1 is edited and due into stock at Old Pond at the beginning of December. Part 2 will follow in the New Year.

This is what they say about Part 1:

Presented by Stephen Richmond and narrated by Jonathan Whitlam, Modern Tractors takes a close look at the modern tractors of the last ten years. This, the first part of two, brings together the most sophisticated machines from John Deere, Claas, Valtra, Same Deutz-Fahr and Case IH and Stephen also explains how the powershift transmission has developed over the years to give more automated functions before developing into the ultimate - the constantly variable gearbox of the 21st century.
 
Each manufacturer's models are looked at, starting from the origins of the models built today so that with John Deere we start with the 6000 and 7000 series of 1992 and see how they developed through the various models since then until we see the present day 6030, 7030, 8030 and 9030 ranges all hard at work. This is then brought right up to date with the latest 8RT series crawlers.
 
The Claas section sees the advent of the Renault Ares range which was later taken over by Claas as well as the development of the Xerion tractor and the Caterpillar Challenger sold in Claas colours. The new Claas Axion and Arion ranges brings the Claas story up to date.
 
Valtra starts with the Valmet and later Valtra Valmet tractors of the 1990s before moving to the new T and S Series built under the ownership of AGCO.
 
Same Deutz-Fahr brings together many different makes including Same, Lamborghini and Hurlimann but here we concentrate mainly on the Deutz-Fahr line which has since proved to be the trend-setting brand within this Italian group of companies.
 
Finally Case IH comes under the spotlight with a look at the development of the high horsepower Magnum range from its inception in 1988 through to the powerful Magnum range of today as well as the MXM and MXU models and the Maxxum and Puma models that replaced them to name but a few.
 
Part Two will continue the story with New Holland, JCB, McCormick and Landini, Fendt, Challenger and Massey Ferguson as well as Stephen taking a look at on-board computer control systems and axle and cab suspension systems.

New light on the exciting early days of Harry Ferguson

Harry Ferguson before the plough by Michael Clarke in collaboration with Jack Woods. Quality paperback with gatefold, 160 pages including 50 photographs and line drawings. Published by Ballyhay Books and distributed by Old Pond at £12.99. IN STOCK.

Colin Fraser’s standard work, Harry Ferguson: inventor and pioneer, sketches in the great man’s early adventures in less than twenty pages. This new book, dealing mostly with the period 1906-13, completes the story.

The young Ferguson, apprenticed at his brother’s motor repair workshop, developed an over-riding interest in all things mechanical. He built and raced motorbikes and cars, then turned to aviation, designing, building and flying his own aeroplane. He was the first person to fly a plane in Ireland.

Ferguson’s obsession with flight – the same single-minded determination he was later to devote to his tractors and farm machinery – makes for fascinating reading. He had to solve engineering problems and then take all the risks that early aviators faced. There were plenty of thrills and spills.

The authors are both aviation enthusiasts, Jack Woods having had several books about aviation in Northern Ireland published. They have researched the subject deeply, and among the many fine illustrations in the book are 27 from the Ferguson family museum.

Seventy Years of Farm Machinery: Seedtime - new book advance information

Brian Bell's Fifty Years of Farm Machinery has long been a standard book for enthusiasts. Although Brian can only show a random sample of the hundreds of implements and machines used on the land, in his new edition he has considerably expanded the work. To make the project more manageable, he has divided the subject into two parts, the first of which is to be published this December.

Seventy Years of Farm Machinery Part One: Seedtime by Brian Bell. Hardback, approx 176 pages inc. 276 illustrations. ISBN 978-1-906853-18-1. To be published in December by Old Pond at £19.95.

 CONTENTS
1 The development of the farm tractor from the Fordson Model F to the JCB Fastrac.
2 Trailed and mounted conventional and reversible ploughs, chisel ploughs, push-pull ploughs and square ploughs.
3 Cultivators, disc harrows, chain harrows, power harrows, rotary cultivators, subsoilers, combination cultivators, steerage hoes and weeders. 
4 Grain drills, cultivator drills and direct drills.
5 Root drills and precision seeders.
6 Potato planters and vegetable planters.
7 Field heap manure spreaders, trailer spreaders, side-spreaders and slurry spreaders.
8 Manure loaders, front-end loaders and rear loaders.
9 Full-width fertiliser distributors, spinner broadcasters and pneumatic spreaders.
10 Farm crop sprayers, air-blast sprayers, controlled droplet sprayers, band sprayers and weed wipers.
Index

As Brian Bell writes in his Foreword:
'A late 1940s farming report suggested that the past decade could well have seen the coming of a second agricultural revolution. This prediction proved to be accurate with much of the credit going to Henry Ford, Harry Ferguson, David Brown and other pioneers. Another report recorded the fact that there were thirteen horses for every tractor working on British farms in 1939 - but within ten years horses outnumbered tractors by a ratio of only two to one.
    'This book traces the development of tractors, tillage equipment, drills, fertiliser distributors, manure spreaders and crop sprayers from the days when Fordson Model N tractors were used to pull trailed ploughs, cup-feed drills and field-heap manure spreaders. The progression from those early farm machines to the latest computerised tractor management systems with satellite navigation operated from the comfort of an air-conditioned cab has happened in little more than a single lifetime. Farming folk, many of whom have only recently achieved the status of senior citizen, will remember sitting on a tractor seat with a corn sack over their knees to keep out the cold, walking behind a cup-feed drill or chopping out sugar beet and turnips with a hand hoe.'

Tractor Restoration: paintwork. New DVD advance information

Alan Davies shows how he sets about preparing and spraying a tractor. Hopefully, if you follow his guidance you will be able to reach concourse standard.

Tractor Restoration: paintwork by Alan Davies. Double-DVD set, approx 2 hours 22 minutes. IN STOCK at Old Pond Publishing at £19.95.

The blogs of 26 February 2008 and 24 March 2009 have shown some of the progress on this programme. The work has taken nearly three years.

 Alan Davies shows how he sets about preparing and spraying a tractor. Hopefully, if you follow his guidance you will be able to reach concourse standard.

Alan starts with assessing the problems posed by an individual job and then, after dis-assembly, goes meticulously through preparation. He shows how he repairs light damage to tinwork; how he fills, sands and stops. He uses simple aids so that bonnets and other items can be handled and worked on easily.

Throughout the demonstrations Alan tells you why he is doing jobs in a particular way, drawing on his long experience as a professional restorer.

In Part 2 Alan moves on to the techniques of spraying, starting with the some principles: the spray booth, choice of paints, types of spray gun and how to mix paint. We watch while he cleans and de-greases the tinwork, sprays primer and then flats it down.

Alan goes on to mask an assembled bonnet before applying the colour coats. He gives fault-finding tips and demonstrates how he polishes out minor blemishes. Even when he applies decals Alan has some useful advice for the amateur restorer.

In the last part of the  programme Alan shows how he brings wheels to perfection and deals with the chassis. 

Contents list

Disk 1
Introduction
Panels
  -modifying new panels (brazing-in the correct shaped hole)
  -beating out damage
  -filling
  -stopping

Disk 2. Spraying the panels.
 Wheels and castings.
Spray guns
Paint
Spray booth
Cleaning and degreasing
Spray gun techniques
Mixing primer
Spraying primer - panels
Assembling panels
Colour coat inside/primer outside
Flatting primer
Masking
Mixing colour coat (3M System)
Spraying colour - panels
Spraying small items
Polishing out minor scratches
Decals

Wheels
  -filling
  -stopping
  -flatting primer
  -spraying colour

Chassis
  -cleaning
  -flatting primer
  -spraying colour
 

In the Driving Seat - new book advance information

Forty-four years driving for a living have given Alex Heymer a wealth of stories ...

In the Driving Seat by Alex Heymer. Paperback book, 264 pages including 8 pages photographs. ISBN 978-1-905523-96-2. IN STOCK at Old Pond at £9.95.

Alex always wanted to be a driver, like his father, and learned at a very young age. During his national service he drove for the RAF, and then went on to trolleybuses for London Transport. He returned to London Transport later to drive RTs and Routemasters. He has lots of tales about driver shenanigans on the trolleybusus and buses.

Seasonal coach tours were another important part of Alex’s career. With Galleon he took parties to Scotland, Wales and the west of England, entertaining his passengers with light-hearted banter and a few historical facts. Misadventures included a nasty slide off a collapsing road.

For nearly thirty years Alex drove tankers for Gulf Oil. This was a period rich with anecdote including scams, spillages and oil-drenchings. Even in retirement Alex has kept his hand in with casual driving work.

Once a driver always a driver – at least, when you love the profession as much as Alex Heymer does.

Alex with his Dad – and his International truck - outside their house in Stratford, east London, in about 1937.

Alex drove for London Transport when RTs were giving way to Routemasters.

Seasonal coach tours brought Alex a lot of fum - as well as some mishaps. He covered Scotland, Wales and the West of England.

For nearly thirty years Alex drove for Gulf Oil.

Know Your Trucks - new book advance information

Following his immensely successful Scania at Work book, Patrick W Dyer has turned his attention to preparing a pocket-sized title in the Know Your ... series for novice enthusiasts.

Know Your Trucks, paperback book, 96 pages including 45 illustrations. ISBN 978-1-906853-19-8. IN STOCK at Old Pond at £4.99.

As Patrick writes in his Foreword - 'Trucks (or lorries) are all around us. Virtually everything that we eat, drink, wear, ride, drive and, in many cases, live in has at some time been delivered by a truck.

'Trucks form the backbone of industry, feeding the factories with the raw materials and components which enable them to create the end products that are then collected by trucks to be delivered to the shops, dealers and end users. The world economy is dependent on trucks to keep the goods moving, allowing trade between countries to flourish.

'With its origins in the early part of the last century, the truck has developed over the years into a highly specialised tool with a staggering range of variants to fulfil a multitude of tasks. Stringent regulations ensure that trucks are now some of the most efficient and cleanest vehicles on the road.

'As a book of this size could not adequately cover the variants of just one model range from just one manufacturer, we decided it would be better to explain to you the purpose of some of the more common types of trucks that you will see every day on our roads.'

The 44 types shown in the book include flatbeds, box vans, refrigerateds, curtainsiders, sliding canopies, container artic, oil tanker, diesel artic, bulk powder artic, vacuum tanker, machinery carrier, low loader, car and bus transporters, tipper trucks, skip trucks, glass carrier, furniture van, logging trailer, concrete mixer, refuse truck, horsebox, road/rail truck, heavy haulage example and recovery truck.

Patrick accompanies each picture (the majority of which are from the manufacturers) with a clear description of type, a guide to typical use and some engineering details. These are reinfoced by a cutaway and diagrams at the end of the book.

Among the manufacturers who contributed pictures to the book are Isuzu Trucks, Mercedes-Benz UK, Iveco, DAF and Volvo.

We Waved to the Baker - new book by Andrew Arbuckle advance information

We Waved to the Baker: tales of a rural childhood by Andrew Arbuckle, hardback book, 144 pages with illustrations by Graham Lang. ISBN 978-1-906853-16-7. IN STOCK at  Old Pond Publishing at £12.95.

'We boys scuttled down.... Having had our tea, it was not really hunger that drove us on such foraging expeditions, but the sight of a large bowl of Mum’s trifle....'

We Waved to the Baker is an evocative and heart-warming collection of stories from Andrew Arbuckle’s youth in Fife. Through the fresh gaze of childhood, he depicts the rugged hard work of life on the farm, while capturing beautifully the essence of growing up in a boisterous family and a close rural community.

We follow the young Andrew as he deals with the trials and tribulations of school, older brothers and plucking chickens, while throwing into the mix as much mischievous play as possible.

Andrew Arbuckle comes from a Fife farming family which, like many others, could trace their roots back to the west of Scotland. The third son of a tenant farmer, Andrew went on to farm with his father in the 1970s. The farm was mainly arable, growing malting barley, seed potatoes and, before the closure of the local refining factory, sugar beet. The tenancy of the farm was given up in the late 1980s.

During his farming, Andrew contributed to a number of farming magazines and this interest developed into full-time agricultural journalism with the Dundee Courier where he was farming editor for fifteen years.

A short spell as a member of the Scottish Parliament followed between 2005 and 2007. Over the past twenty years, he has been a councillor in Fife. Nowadays, he is a freelance journalist, combining this with agricultural public relations work.

In 2009 Andrew’s first book, Footsteps to the Furrow, was published by Old Pond: ‘An excellent book for anyone interested in Scottish farming’ (Fordyce Maxwell in the Southern Reporter).

Britain's Massive Miners Part 2 - new DVD advance information

In the second of his two programmes looking at the dedicated machinery working in Britain's surface coal mines (and also a quarry), Steven Vale has found the largest hydraulic excavator working here. As in his other acclaimed DVDs, Steven Vale supplies plenty of information about the machines in his enthusiastic and detailed script which is narrated by David Holt.

Britain's Massive Miners Part 2, Steven Vale. DVD, approx 82 minutes,  £15.95 (inc. VAT). IN STOCK at Old Pond Publishing

A Northumberland surface coal mine is the setting for the hydraulic excavator which is currently the biggest in Britain and the biggest Terex model in Europe – the Terex O&K RH 200. It works with advanced noise- and dust-suppression technology to load nearly 50 tonnes a time with a 26 cubic metre bucket.

At work in a Yorkshire limestone quarry is the largest excavator Caterpillar currently has in Britain. Only four of these 5130s were ever  brought into the country.

A Scottish coal mine yields examples of the R 9350, Liebherr’s biggest excavator in Britain, working with the country’s largest fleet of Terex TR 100 dump trucks and a big Cat 834H wheeled loader.

Other highlights of this exciting programme are a 340-tonne O&K RH170, the only one in Britain, and an old 480-tonne O&K RH 200 loading Cat 789 trucks. There is even a quick look at Chevington Collier, a decommissioned Bucyrus-Erie 1260W walking dragline.

The main machines in this programme (See blogs of 17 & 28 June, 12 & 20 July for pictures)
Terex O&K RH 120-E hydraulic excavator
Terex TR100 dump trucks
Liebherr R 9350 hydraulic excavator (face-shovel and backhoe)
Cat 834H wheeled dozer
Cat D10T tracked dozer
Bucyrus Erie dragline
O&K RH 170 hydraulic excavator
Cat 785 dump trucks
O&K RH 200 hydraulic excavator
Cat 789 dump trucks
Cat 385 hydraulic excavator
Cat 5130B hydraulic excavator
Terex O&K RH 200 hydraulic excavator

Britain's Massive Miners Part 1 - new DVD advance information

Britain's surface coal-mining industry continues to contribute to our power supplies. This year, Steven Vale has been looking at some of the enterprises flourishing in south Wales, Lanarkshire and Northumberland. He has uncovered hydraulic excavators and haul trucks of a significant size by European and even world standards. His results are to be seen in two companion DVDs, of which this is the first.

Britain's Massive Miners Part 1, Steven Vale, DVD approx 79 minutes plus extra, £15.95 (inc. VAT). IN STOCK at Old Pond Publishing

Komatsu and Hitachi star in the first of Steven Vale’s films about the hydraulic excavators to be found at work in Britain’s surface coal mines.

In Wales, Steven recorded a couple of 250-tonne PC 3000s, the Dash-6 currently being the biggest and newest Komatsu excavator in Britain. They dwarf the Cat 777F dump trucks they are loading with overburden. Not far away a Demag H185S also loads overburden.

The biggest Hitachi excavators currently at work in the UK are the EX 1900s which Steven also recorded in Wales. They come in at 190 tonnes.

Among the face shovels and backhoes at work in Northumberland are the O&K RH 120-Cs, still going strong after twenty years. Some of them feature industry-leading noise- and dust-suppression technology. These popular workhorses are joined by the very first Cat-powered 120-Es in Britain.

The main machines in this programme (see blogs of 17 & 28 June, 12 & 20 July for pictures)
O&K RH 120-C hydraulic excavator (face-shovels and backhoe)
Terex O&K RH 120-E hydraulic excavator
Cat D9T tracked dozer
Cat 785 dump truck
Demag H185S hydraulic excavator
Cat 824H wheeled dozer
Komatsu PC3000 Dash-1 hydraulic excavator
Komatsu PC3000 Dash-6 hydraulic excavators (face-shovel and backhoe)
Cat 777F dump trucks
Komatsu PC1250 Dash-8 hydraulic excavator
Cat 16M grader
Hitachi EX1900 Dash-5 hydraulic excavator
Hitachi EX1900 Dash-6 hydraulic excavator

Destination Doha - new DVD advance information

Destination Doha, produced by Tony Salmon for the BBC 'World About Us' series in 1977, double-DVD set, approx 98 minutes. IN STOCK at Old Pond, £17.95 (inc. VAT).

Doha, capital of Qatar on the Arabian Gulf – five thousand miles from London with 11 countries to travel through and 23 Customs posts on the way. Blizzards in Austria, sandstorms in Syria; broken-down trucks to repair and bogged-down trucks to dig out of the sand.…

 
The exciting, gruelling life of drivers on the overland run to the Middle East was captured by the BBC’s World About Us series in 1977 and transmitted in two parts.

In Part One, ‘The Easy Bit?’, we meet British drivers Frank Hook, John Williams, Dave Poulton and Dick Rivers. We follow their mixed fortunes and tyre changes across Europe, into communist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and then to Turkey where bureaucracy was a way of life.

Part Two’s ‘Difficult Bit’ leads through chillingly dangerous roads to Ankara and over the Taurus mountains. Then through Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia – each offering a different challenge to the drivers and their Scania and Leyland trucks.

This double-DVD set contains both parts of the original programme. You’ll see that for these Astran International drivers their work was more than just a job – it was a way of life with a sense of adventure, winter and summer, ice-cold and desert-hot.

The photographs have been kindly supplied by Ashley Coghill whose own book, The Long Haul Pioneers, telling the full story of Astran International will be published in 2010.