For a first try at an electric vehicle conversion we’re guessing that most would pick a small city car as a base vehicle, or perhaps a Kei van. Not [LiamTronix], who instead chose to do it with an old Ferguson tractor. It might not be the most promising of EV platforms, but as you can see in the video below, it results in a surprisingly practical agricultural vehicle.
A 1950s or 1960s tractor like the Ferguson usually has its engine as a structural member with the bellhousing taking the full strength of the machine and the front axle attached to the front of the block. Thus after he’s extracted the machine from its barn we see him parting engine and gearbox with plenty of support, as it’s a surprisingly hazardous process. These conversions rely upon making a precise plate to mount the motor perfectly in line with the input shaft. We see this process, plus that of making the splined coupler using the center of the old clutch plate. It’s been a while since we last did a clutch alignment, and seeing him using a 3D printed alignment tool we wish we’d had our printer back then.
The motor is surprisingly a DC unit, which he first tests with a 12 V car battery. We see the building of a hefty steel frame to take the place of the engine block in the structure, and then a battery pack that’s beautifully built. The final tractor at the end of the video still has a few additions before it’s finished, but it’s a usable machine we wouldn’t be ashamed to have for small round-the-farm tasks.
Surprisingly there haven’t been as many electric tractors on these pages as you’d expect, though we’ve seen some commercial ones.
I don’t like being a safety safety, but people getting injured with tractors tipping over are very common. The intro in the video was a bit scary.
Impressive build though.
Where I live, all the diggers etc have their roll cages missing, it almost looks intentional or is it just that they keep using it after a tip over and just cut the cage off?
without seat belt, cage useless
Our tractor explicitly says, ‘if you have to fold down the roll-cage (as required for some attachments), do not use the seatbelt. Likewise, if you’re not using the seatbelt, the roll-cage will do nothing for you even when extended.’
All of these on appropriate safety/warning stickers with stick figures receiving grievous injuries.
I love the way the smoke appeared from the rear of the tractor when the exhaust pipe is above the engine at the front. Special effects for youtube no doubt.
watch about the 6:00 minute mark you can see the exhaust and muffler going to the rear.
But facts are way less fun than acting all smug while eye-rolling about “kids these days”, or something.
It was often a common modification to reroute the exhaust to the rear. Exhaust flap valves would often rust, seizing it either open or closed. A defective exhaust flap valve can easily destroy an engine by allowing moisture inside.
perkins 203 4 cylinder engine used in some massey fergusons had a reversible exhaust manifold, that’s why it was common. the more powerful perkins engines did not. I think a hot exhaust dragging the crops could start a fire.
I like the method fordson used in their major tractors. they had a swan neck in the exhaust pipe with a small hole at the lowest point to let water escape. of course it could clog up but the design was a work of art.
sadly modern tractors tend to shun the design, perhaps because of the gases entering the cab.
A classic Massey Ferguson! Now I hear, rattling around the dark recesses of my mind is, an old rhyme: “A Massey is classy, but a Zetor is better”
Slung Blade on the SomethingAwful auto forums did the same conversion except about a decade ago and it used lead-acid batteries, partly because of the tech available but also because these tractors need lots of mass to be useful. It barely had enough endurance to mow the lawn and struggled at doing more than harrowing, but it worked well enough for a hobby garden.
Endurance is always an issue. Tractors are designed to turn on and provide constant power for a long long time and provide power to other machines or addons as well, not just riding. Farming is like a time based strategy game. If you have grains for example and the meter says it’s 13.8% moisture, you have to wait, maybe an hour later it dropped to 13.5% and you can harvest, but there might be rain coming, so you have to plow the entire field right now. That’s why you sometimes see farmers on the field an entire night. Running the tractor for 20 hours without stopping, hoping to get it all in in time. It’s pretty brutal on the machines.
This machine might be fine for a hobby garden indeed but not much more than that.
If I had space I’d love an old tractor. Lanz Bulldog, or a Fendt, or a Deutz. Some oldschool tractor I can drive around on. Take it grocery shopping or go to Ikea with it. The sound of a single cilinder tractor is just amazing. The noises, the smell, it’s just great. I love it. Friend of mine had a tractor for years, 50’s Ford. He drove it everywhere until it got stolen. Wish my yard was big enough.
Dang that’s a shame, how’d they manage not to find who stole it? But yes the idea that you would miss some very time-sensitive work because of a recharge is pretty much unacceptable, maybe if there was an interchangeable battery.. But it’ll still need to put out a lot of power for a long time to be practical
There are it seems plenty of jobs and periods of time around the farm that the electric tractor would be great, I agree without something like a quick battery swap or external generator (Perhaps in place of the traditional weight block) its not going to be a drop in replacement for the most intense periods. But still to be a useful farm tool all it needs to be is cheaper to run for the day in, day out bits.
So I’d suggest this concept has plenty of use on a working farm, especially places like the UK where the fields are comparatively tiny to most nations and fuel really isn’t cheap. As assuming the farmer can manage to afford the intimal setup they probably have enough space on their barns to put solar and thus end up with the more usual day to day parts of farming being all electric, and almost entirely running cost free.
A friend with a primarily horticulture farm has found that his tractor is only needed for ~15% of what it used to be used for. Small electric fat wheelers do most of the work now, and they are quite a lot faster as there are several. And yes solar makes most of the power. He is pretty interested in getting some autonomous ones that can follow a person who is walking as a mobile tool bag, or do the run back to the packhouse automatically.
While perusing some early 1960’s Popular Mechanics, I believe I saw an electric tractor, but it was running on a fuel cell instead of batteries, so some of this has been done before. In some cases the technology was not ready to implement the idea very well.
This guy has an impressive skill set!
if you are going to use it as an actual tractor converting it to electric is about the dumbest thing in the world. the energy density is not there to use a tractor like they are designed to do. Now if he just wants sweet youtube clickbait like it appears great.
You can’t say what is practical if you don’t know what its use would be. My grandad had a Massey Ferguson that would have been perfect as an electric. It’s main use was taking cattle cake, silage, or hay out to the fields.
Just because an electric tractor is useful doesn’t mean someone’s going to come and take away your strangely clean truck.
Interesting, but I’m not surprised you don’t see so many electric tractor conversions. I have a modern zero-turn ride-on mower (petrol), and a 40yo half-litre diesel tractor with a 6′ slasher on the back. I can tell you the tractor uses WAY less fuel than the ride-on, even in terms of hours, let alone area covered.
A nuclear powered tractor would be much more practical.
Jenny, is that you?
No, I didn’t think so. The previous article (KolibriOS) doesn’t quite sound like Maya, either. They sure sound similar to each other, though. Kind of dry point-by-point descriptive, like a science paper abstract (“… then we see the ” [author / experimenter / test subject] “proceed to the penultimate step and ” [remove / insert / lose] “the tertiary” [bolt / power unit / plot device] “; however, a ” [sucessful / surprising / disasterous] [something] “was” [sucessfully / suprisingly / disasterously] etc.
Please tell me I’m just being paranoid, and HaD isn’t experimenting with LLMs. And appologies to both authors if I’m just having an off day; I do like both of y’alls work.
Hey! I know that scrapyard (at 10:36)! I’ve got 300 lbs of steel from there sitting in my smithy shed right now.
It’s not in Burlington (the location stated on the video’s YT page), I can tell you that.
Add a rollbar (ROPS) as the next project.
Wow, i run a small farm myself and such a vehicle would fit so many uses, minus the noise and exhaust fumes !
On these old tractors we heavily rely on the engine braking and seldom touch the brake pedals … I guess with the conversion it ought to be different ! Maybe a clever regenerative braking mechanism could emulate this behaviour while giving some extra autonomy ?
A fully working hydraulic system (tp have some plugs and hydraulicly actuated equipments) would be a massive plus but given the rear 3pt lifting arms are functional on his conversion you could still tap on this system to have some hydraulic working.
In France we have a community of farmers hackers called ” L’Atelier Paysan ” sharing guides and schemes published under CC licences … are there such communities in the USA and UK ?