Unipower Forester Timber Tractor

By Josephine Roberts
Published on April 25, 2011
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The bonnet (or hood?) is quite a long way up!
The bonnet (or hood?) is quite a long way up!
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Pete’s 1952 Unipower Forester: It looks great, it sounds great and it’s still capable of a good day’s work. What more can you ask for?
Pete’s 1952 Unipower Forester: It looks great, it sounds great and it’s still capable of a good day’s work. What more can you ask for?
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I couldn’t help falling in love with those lovely old wooden window frames.
I couldn’t help falling in love with those lovely old wooden window frames.
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The business end of this handsome old timber tractor.
The business end of this handsome old timber tractor.
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And there she is, the lovely, smooth 4-cylinder Gardner diesel engine. The same engine can be found in various makes of vintage busses and boats.
And there she is, the lovely, smooth 4-cylinder Gardner diesel engine. The same engine can be found in various makes of vintage busses and boats.
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The only thing I didn’t much like about the Unipower was that the accelerator (the gas pedal) was situated in the spot where you would normally find the brake, which could get messy.
The only thing I didn’t much like about the Unipower was that the accelerator (the gas pedal) was situated in the spot where you would normally find the brake, which could get messy.
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The 1952 Unipower Forester
The 1952 Unipower Forester
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By day Pete works for the local authority mending the roads here in the Conwy Valley, but whenever he gets the chance he likes to give the Unipower a bit of work. Living in what is the woodiest area of Wales means that Pete has plenty of tree winching opportunities.
By day Pete works for the local authority mending the roads here in the Conwy Valley, but whenever he gets the chance he likes to give the Unipower a bit of work. Living in what is the woodiest area of Wales means that Pete has plenty of tree winching opportunities.

I’m sure one of the reasons North Wales is such a great place for spotting vintage tractors at work is because it is a relatively poverty-stricken little country. I don’t mean that we can’t afford shoes here, but rather that Wales, and indeed Britain as a whole, has become an expensive place to live in recent times, and many small agricultural contractors find it makes more sense to continue using their old machines than to pay for state-of-the-art, modern machinery. We do have modern farms and machinery here, but if contracting work isn’t your main income, then it makes sense to make do and mend when it comes to machinery.

Much of this region of North Wales is woody. While the bulk of timberwork goes to large contractors with cutting edge forestry harvesting equipment, a certain amount of private work is usually available for the regular guy who is in possession of some reliable old kit.

I suppose the bottom line is that most tractor enthusiasts love nothing more than a spot of winching, and if you can make a bit of cash out of it, so much the better. It is always nice to feel that your vintage tractor is earning its keep and continuing to do the job it was intended for. Much of this old equipment is still fully capable of a good day’s work.

The Unipower Forester

One timber tractor that I know personally is the 1952 Unipower Forester that belongs to my brother Pete. Regular readers of my column will by now be getting to feel that they know Pete quite well, as I’ve featured some of his tractors in previous articles. Pete and I tend to share the same (excellent!) taste in tractors, so I feel that his little collection includes some great examples of good old British tractors, which is what inspires me to share them with you folk over there. The Unipower Forester is quite unusual in that it is one of those machines that looks for all the world like a truck, but is in fact classed as a tractor.

There aren’t many of these handsome beasts around. I had certainly never seen one before, but Pete had, and he’d been dreaming about them for a good few years before he managed to track down this particular model. “I never thought I’d actually be able to own one of these,” he says, adding that this is one machine he will be hanging on to no matter what.

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