In the Boogie Wundaland studio

I've taken to calling my shed a studio because of the arty farty things I get up to sometimes. Some might call it glorified bodging.

This weekend I was sculpting in steel a new bottom edge to the radiator grille for this Nuffield 9/16 Mini tractor. It belongs to my very good friend and neighbour Andrew Snell. He bought it on eBay about three years ago with severely corroded front wheels and another of his mates converted some old Massey Ferguson wheels to the peculiar stud pattern that Nuffield used. Andrew also managed to find a spare bonnet for this tractor on eBay although the bottom lip was badly corroded.

The original much-bashed-about bonnet had quite a good lip so he had the idea to make one good bonnet out of the twain. Some of mates among the local tractor owning mafia reckoned a repair in glassfibre was the solution but Andrew felt this area could be prone to damage and steel would be preferable. For some reason, he thinks I'm a better well than he is. I quite like welding and when it came to the chance of returning one of the many favours that he's already done for me, I jumped at the chance to "get him back" and Andrew's Mini tractor paid a visit to the Boogie Wundaland studio.

After some thought, I marked around the new good bit and dropped off the old bottom edge of the best bonnet. Even though it was the straightest bonnet of the pair, it had still been knocked around a bit and one corner turned out to be so bad I couldn't use it. Fortunately, I had an old Hillman Imp bonnet that had a swage line on it that was nearly the right profile. After a bit of effort dropping out a suitable section from this, I managed to get an acceptable continuity of line along the bottom edge and around the corners.

I still had to build up the surface with weld, however. Checking with a straight edge showed that the resulting panel was below the proper surface. Making strategic blobs of weld allowed the creation of reference points. When Andrew comes to apply some filler to this bonnet, he can use these as high points and fill in between. It's a bit like a three-dimensional sketching -- instead of making marks on a piece of paper, you make a series of points that will later merge into one unified but correctly shaped surface.

They will be some time before he gets around to doing the filler trick so, I'm to preserve the welding, I painted it in Finnegan's Number 1 anti-rust paint. The whole of that bottom section of bonnet could really do with shot blasting, because there's still quite a surface rust in some of the more awkward corners. As it happens, I have shot blasting equipment so, later on, we might have a go at this.

The result wasn't quite the seamless example of invisible mending that I was hoping for but Andrew said he was delighted with it and it does look better than it did. It'll look even better once it's filled, primed and painted and, considering that the bottom right hand corner didn't exist at all at one point, I'm fairly pleased with the result.

The Nuffield Mini tractor is not really my idea of a Vintage Thing but many other people would say that it is and I will admit to being quite intrigued by it, although not to the extent of wanting to own one. They are quite small -- even smaller than a grey Fergie -- and were introduced at a time when tractors were getting bigger. Consequently, there aren't many Mini tractors around.

The engine is a diesel version of the well-known BMC A series engine. From above, the similarity is obvious and, in this form, it displaces 948cc so has more in common with an Austin A35 engine than that of a Mini. I don't know how much is interchangeable with the petrol engines. The cylinder head must be different and if you look closely enough between the starter motor and exhaust manifold (click on the picture for a larger image) you can see cast into the side of the engine block "950D" so maybe the block is special, too. Apparently, petrol engines were an option on this type of tractor, and there was a slightly bigger version known as the 4/25 that used a diesel version of the 1.5 litre BMC B series engine. Some of these diesel B series were used in Wolseley 1500s but, as far as I know, no cars were ever fitted with a diesel A series engine, which were only ever rated at 15 bhp.

Working on this tractor and admiring its little engine, stirred a distant memory and after a rummage around in the Boogie Wundaland archives I found this photograph (courtesy of Commonwealth Industrial Gases Limited) in Barney Sharratt's history of the baby Austins -- that's the A30, A35 and A40. It depicts a ride-on mower built out of an old Austin A30 by Brisbane City Council planning inspector Ken Diggles.

I reckon it's only a matter of time before an A35 appears on here as a Vintage Thing. I was once given a very early but very rusty A30 and my grandparents had an A35 van converted into an estate car so I'm already quite familiar with them. My example was so rusty the lower wishbones rotted through and the coil spring burst through on one side. I gave it away to someone else who had several others. The 803cc engines in the A30 are a bit weak in the crank and probably wouldn't survive being converted to diesel. I sometimes wonder what a 1275cc A35 with proper telescopic dampers and Spridget disc brakes would be like....

That little belt driven on top of Andrew’s engine is for the hydraulic system and soon after Andrew bought this little tractor of a pipe split spectacularly with great loss of fluid. After a certain amount of head scratching, we managed to effect a repair involving a length of copper pipe that I had left over from replacing the Hydragas pipes on my A series powered Austin Allegro -- a case of a distant relative coming to the rescue. Andrew describes himself as a general builder that is something of a demon when it comes to plumming and, after I had produced an acceptable flare to one end of the new pipe with my vice mounted Sykes-Pickavant flaring tool, he unbrazed the fittings on the old pipe and sweated them onto the new. This worked surprisingly well and Andrew subsequently used this tractor’s hydraulic drawbar arrangement to lift the front end of a loaded machinery trailer that needed a new jockey wheel fitted. Despite the front wheels of the Mini tractor being raised off the ground, nothing burst. Andrew reckons that this virtual destruction testing involved a load of about three tons, all lifted by means of that little pump.

The engine runs well and holds good oil pressure, although occasionally there is a stutter at idle and quite a bit of smoke. This clears at higher revs or when working. We suspect the valves.

There is something quite endearing about these little diesels because they make the injector pumps looks so big. I've seen hardened tractor men go into raptures over these machines that shows.

And their wives are even worse. One said to me once, "That little tractor is so cute, I could wear it as a badge.”