Yorkshireman Malcolm Norris happens to own what is arguably one of the most striking-looking tractors ever to come out of the David Brown stable, namely a David Brown “Thresherman.” The technical name for this eye-catching machine is David Brown heavy duty tractor (Threshing Model) VTK 143, but these units are often referred to as Thresherman tractors. Even though that is not the name given to the model by David Brown, it’s the name that stuck.
Given that they were not made in huge numbers, they are rather an usual sight, even here in the U.K. Extremely robust and rather specialist, the Thresherman was an expensive tractor, aimed more at the agricultural contractor than the regular farmer.
These tractors were equipped with powerful winch and a pulley, which was powered by a shaft from the winch’s chain housing. These features made the Thresherman a useful portable powerhouse, ideally suited for belt-driving large implements like threshing machines. The tractor also boasted some very low gears, which could make light work of towing cumbersome threshing machines up steep hills.
From a practical point of view, the Thresherman was perfectly designed for hauling heaving loads and powering large machinery, but from a purely aesthetic perspective, the shapely wrap-around tinwork makes this a stylish and unusual-looking tractor. It is no wonder that collectors of British tractors find these machines highly desirable.
Not just any restoration project
Malcolm Norris would never describe himself as a tractor enthusiast. He was always more attracted to rally cars, and heavy, slow-moving machines like tractors were never really his thing. One might reasonably ask how he has ended up with a Thresherman.
Well, this isn’t just any Thresherman. This tractor once belonged to Malcom’s late father Geoff, so while Malcolm isn’t a tractor fanatic per se, this particular tractor, and this one only, has a very special place in his heart.
This glorious curvy lump of a tractor dates to 1946, and Malcolm has all of the tractor’s early history. It was sold new to an agricultural contractor by Telfords of Harrogate, a Yorkshire-based David Brown tractor dealership. This is a Yorkshire tractor through and through. As the David Brown factory was in Yorkshire, this is an apple that really hasn’t fallen far from the tree. By coincidence, Malcom’s father once worked at the very same David Brown agent’s, and no doubt his early days as a David Brown mechanic gave Geoff Norris a fondness for these tractors.
By 1963, Geoff Norris was instead running a timber business at Beckwith Head Sawmill in Harrogate, and he was looking for a tractor to power a rack bench. When he saw the Thresherman tractor for sale, he knew it was just what he was looking for. Although designed to be a threshing tractor, it was also perfectly suited to sawmill work. It had good towing capabilities for carting trailer loads of wood, it had a winch for timber extraction, and it had a pulley he could use with a belt for turning the rack bench.
The rack bench powered by the Thresherman undertook some quite historic work. Geoff had the contract to make wooden chocks, which went on to be used in many of Yorkshire’s coal mines, so the tractor was in constant work, and when it wasn’t powering the rack bench, it was out and about hauling timber.
At the time, there weren’t many tractors around that had good winching capabilities. Word soon got around that he had a useful winching tractor, and people regularly called on Geoff to help pull out machines that were stuck in bogs and other sticky situations. Some of these rescue missions involved heading out far into the Yorkshire Dales to rescue stricken plant and machinery. Sometimes Geoff would use the tractor for contracting work. Some of those jobs lasted months, as when he assisted a pipe-laying company as they laid a major gas pipe.
Rolled over by a snowball
The old Thresherman tractor served Geoff well. When he retired, the tractor was left parked in the corner of the yard. After Geoff had sadly passed away, Malcolm was faced with the arduous task of having to clear his late father’s yard. Malcolm realised that he would have to move the sad-looking, now derelict David Brown from its resting place in order to make some space.
The rusty old Thresherman tractor had been standing for a few decades by that time, and the years had not been kind. Had this been just any old tractor, Malcolm might have taken the easy option and found a buyer for the rusting hulk, but this was his late father’s tractor, and it’s never easy to get rid of something that has featured so largely in a loved one’s life.
Before making a decision about what to do with the tractor, Malcolm thought he would steam-clean it and then see if he could get it running. It was wishful thinking to hope that the tractor might just fire up, but sometimes tractors can look a lot more derelict than they actually are. Occasionally some real wrecks will fire up with minimum fettling, so there’s nothing wrong with a bit of optimism. However, the Thresherman wasn’t going to wake from its slumber that easily, as Malcolm soon discovered.
“After about a month of pouring various different freeing agents down the plug holes, and repeatedly trying the starting handle, I came to the conclusion that the engine just wasn’t going to move,” Malcolm says. “I took the head off, and it was immediately obvious why it wouldn’t shift: Water had made its way into the engine via the exhaust, and so it all began.”
Without fully realising it, Malcolm had taken his first step on what was to be an interesting, challenging and rather lengthy restoration journey. “As I’m sure anyone who has done anything like this will tell you,” he says, “there is a snowball effect, and once you start, it just takes over!”
Neighbor’s spark lights a fire
In order to access the engine, Malcolm removed the tractor’s large, curvaceous front fenders, and he saw straight away that these mudguards were actually a lot more rotten than he had first thought. He began wondering if it was possible to buy new fenders, and he began puzzling over how they could possibly be made to blend in with the rest of the tractor’s aged bodywork.
Already Malcolm could see that simply getting the tractor running was turning into a much bigger job than he had initially expected. “One job rolls into another,” he says, “and I started thinking, ‘well, while the engine is out, I may as well sandblast the tin work,’ and so it went on.”
The initially simple-sounding task of getting the Thresherman running was turning into a long-term project, and in the meantime, Malcolm had to get on with his day-to-day work. “Being self-employed, you have to prioritise work,” he says, “but the time was just rolling on, and the tractor was still standing there. Then one day, a couple of years ago, one of my neighbours wandered into my workshop, looked at the tractor and said, ‘Are we going to get on with this thing then?’ and that was the kickstart that I needed to really throw myself into the restoration.”
As someone who had already successfully built his own rally car, Malcolm had learned that if you are going to do something, you might as well do it properly, and do it only once. There was no point “half-doing” the Thresherman, so while it was in bits, it made sense to go through everything.
After deciding that the old fenders were too far gone to repair, Malcolm found someone capable of making new fenders — namely Robert Midgley of Pool, Wharfdale. Robert used what was left of the original fenders as patterns. That was quite a challenge as the originals were bent and battered and it wasn’t possible to see exactly where the old bolt holes had been. Seemingly simple tasks can take far longer than one might expect. Malcolm recalls that fitting the new mudguards, and trying to find the original bolts that he removed nearly six years earlier, ended up taking several weeks.
Malcolm decided to do a ‘dummy build’ before painting the panels and the fenders, just to make sure that everything was going to fit together properly. This proved to be a wise move, as there is rather a lot of tinwork on a Thresherman tractor. Any incorrectly shaped sections will compromise the neighbouring panel, so accuracy is vital. “There were times when I could easily have said ‘oh that’s good enough’ to many things,” Malcolm says. “But that isn’t my nature, and neither was it my father’s nature.” He took his time, and made sure that everything was done correctly.
“He was right there with me”
Anyone who has a heart and a soul will understand what I mean when I say that some old items can tell a tale. For instance, when we handle or use or repair an old tool or machine, we can’t help but think of the people who used and maintained those items years ago. It’s almost as if old things can absorb something of the past, and one can almost feel the characters and the stories of the era.
When one is working on a tractor that once belonged to a close family member, that too brings back a lot of memories of the person and raises a lot of emotions. Malcolm found that, whilst restoring the tractor, thoughts of his late father regularly came to his mind.
“My father’s words would enter my mind several times a day,” he says, “as if he was commenting on the job, saying things like ‘that needs a spring washer on it’, and ‘you’d better put a spot of grease on that so the next man can get it off’, and questions like ‘why have you left that bolt so long?’, or ‘can you do that a better way?’ all of which made me feel like he was right there with me.”
No shortcuts; no “good enough”
Where possible, Malcolm tried to preserve as much of the tractor as he could, not only in the interest of originality, but also because this was his late father’s tractor, and he didn’t want to dispose of any part of it unnecessarily.
“It has been surprising how many parts were salvageable,” he says. “Just by cleaning parts and spending a bit of time on them, I’ve been able to save a lot of the original tractor.” The headlamps, for instance, were taken apart, cleaned and rebuilt. Malcolm’s neighbour Trevor spent two days cleaning the reflectors, but the satisfying moment when they put the lights back together and got them working, actually using the original bulbs, made the effort all seem worthwhile.
Some of the tractor’s rear light brackets were badly corroded, and they didn’t appear to be like the usual David Brown light brackets. Rather than put on different brackets, Malcolm fabricated exact copies. Whatever those brackets were, something his father had made perhaps, they were part of the story of this tractor.
In the spirit of doing things properly once and for all, Malcolm fitted a new wiring loom on the tractor. He followed all of the original colours and wrapped the wires in the typical cloth type binding. He made new clips to take the wires across the engine and to the rear of the tractor, and secured the wires under the wheel arches with brass clips. He’d hoped that the radiator would be alright (it had continued to hold water and antifreeze since his father had parked it in 1985) but it was not to be.
“I flushed it out, cleaned it, even painted it, spending time making sure it was ready for the rebuilt engine,” he says, “and then I fitted it and checked the temperature of the block and head with a sensor gun and it was running far too hot. In the end, I had to get a new radiator core.”
Breathing life back into his father’s Thresherman tractor was a one-off job for Malcolm – a labour of love, something that will never be repeated. “I’m not a tractor restorer and I’ve no desire whatsoever to ever restore another tractor,” he says with a laugh.
What Malcolm means is that no other tractor would have the same emotional tie with his father, and therefore no other tractor could ever inspire him in the same way again. “I’m sure there are many people who could have managed to do the whole restoration themselves,” he says, “but I can honestly say that this restoration wouldn’t have been at all possible without an array of different people, all of whom have helped me either with their knowledge or with their hands-on work.”
A drive down memory lane
Malcolm began this journey with the thought, ‘I wonder if I can get that tractor going?’ and that simple question led to an epic restoration. Not only has he done justice to his father’s tractor, but he’s also preserved it for many decades to come. When the time came to fire up the restored tractor and drive it for the first time, it understandably felt like a huge occasion to Malcolm. There had been years of build-up to this moment, and here was the prize, the light at the end of the tunnel, the grand finale!
Although he had fitted several new parts onto the tractor, there was one part that Malcolm had no intention of altering or replacing, and that was the steering wheel. “The last person to drive the tractor was my father, so to feel that connection with him through the steering wheel was, and still is, something very special,” he says. “Every time I drive the tractor out of the yard and down the lane, I’m reminded of all the times that my father drove out of that same yard and down the same lane.”
Never having driven the tractor before, or indeed any David Brown tractor, Malcolm wasn’t sure how it would handle, but he found it a pleasant surprise. “It really is lovely to drive,” he says, adding that it is obvious that the tractor was designed to tow, as the first two gears are very low, while the top gear is quite high, giving a top speed of about 12mph, which, for a vintage tractor, really isn’t too bad.
With restorations, it is often hard to know when to stop, and Malcolm thinks he could make more improvements to the winch. “The winch shows signs of wear, there is a bent piece of steel at the base of the winch which looks as though the winch hook has caught it, and there are grooves in the side rollers where the rope has run,” he says, “but these things are part of the tractor’s character and story, and I knew the man who made those marks!” FC
The author gratefully acknowledges Malcolm Norris for sharing his story and Critical Photography for the photographs. Appreciation also to the David Brown Tractor Club and Stuart Gibbard, The David Brown Tractor Story.
Josephine Roberts lives on an old-fashioned smallholding in Snowdonia, North Wales, and has a passion for all things vintage. Email her at josiewales2021@aol.com.
