[AT] David Brown was Allis Chalmers ED40 3 point hitch

[James Peck]

I saw my first David Brown around 1967. I looked at it a long time from several hundred or more feet away. I was working that day for a man who had owned a Massey Harris dealership until around 1960 when MF went to the single line policy.

Cecil Bearden AT List member, Oklahoma farmer, and Professional Engineer (crbearden at copper.net); David Brown was a good solid reliable tractor. When Iw was working at the tractor shop in the 70's while going to college we had 2 David Brown tractors on rental service. They would be out for months at a time and still in good shape when they came back. There was an apartment building boom in the late 60's early 70's and a company would rent our tractor and loader to clean up around apartment sites. We had both an 880 and 990 Brown running with a front loader.  We had a clutch problem after about 1500 hours on loader use with the 990. The mechanic who first worked on the tractor sent the flywheel out to be resurfaced when he replaced the clutch.. I very rarely grind a flywheel. When the tractor was sent out, it came back in a week with the clutch out.  When I came in from college for my 3 day work weekend, I was given the tractor split and the clutch out of it. I replaced the clutch disk with a ceramic button type and a new pressure plate.  It went out 2 weeks and back again.  I started doing some measuring and found that the flywheel was ground,but the pressure plate was recessed in the flywheel and the mounting bosses had not been ground. We had a big 30in swing lathe in the machine shop and I cut the mounting bosses down about .125 installed the old pressure plate and used the ceramic button disk again.  I saw the tractor again several years later it had 5000 hours on it and no clutch problems.

If Case and David Brown had not merged, David Brown may have had better sales in the US. The ag downturn and all the other economic things just hit David Brown and Case like the others......

 Thomas Martin AT List Member (tmartin at xtra.co.nz);  Last century, the foreman mechanic at the local David Brown dealership owned a Ferguson-Brown, when he migrated to Canada, it disappeared, I think it went for scrap! :- David Brown was very strong locally, being an large orcharding area, PTO performance was in demand. DB always out-performed both MF & Ford in driving PTO driven orchard sprayers. The drag of MF & Ford having the PTO shaft running in oil, was detrimental when getting maximum % of flywheel HP to the PTO output shaft. SAME scored well for the same reasons as DB.
	
James AT List Member (jamesgpeck at hotmail.com The first three point hitch tractor, the Ferguson-Brown type A, was manufactured in the UK. I do not know if it was patent protected. By walking away from that joint venture, Harry likely put some of the 3 point hitch into the UK public domain. When he got all the US three point hitch patents for the 9N, that mainly served to keep US based manufacturers from using it gratis. Maybe Ford broke off the joint venture in the US with Ferguson thinking that they would walk away with the intellectual property like David Brown did.