My High-Speed Massey Harris 55 Tractor

In the early 1980's I acquired a 44 Massey Harris tractor that no longer ran. Being somewhat of a red neck I decided to change that. I happened to have a 239 CID V8 out of a '49 Ford 1 ton truck complete with 4 speed transmission. Rather than build some sort of coupler to connect the engine to the input shaft of the tractor transmission, I mounted the engine and truck transmission on the tractor and hooked the whole thing together with a short drive shaft, complete with u-joints. It worked very well but after a few years of pretty hard use, the tractor transmission broke down so I parted it out.

  In 1998 we decided to build a tourist facility (rental cabin) and needing a tractor with a loader, I got to thinking about my prior Massey experience. A friend had an old 1951 Massey Harris 55 sitting in his spare parts storage area (junkyard). I dragged it home and used it for a while with the original engine but it was too hard on gas and oil so I went to work on it.

  Having a spare Chrysler 360 CID V8 sitting in a shed, I thought I'd use it to repower the old 55.

Swapping engines involved building front and rear engine mounts, an output shaft for the clutch and, since the rear of the engine was 1 1/2 inches off center to accommodate the Chrysler direct-drive starter, a short drive shaft using the sliding yoke and u-joints from an old Chevy motor-home. The clutch output shaft was made from a shaft that came from my old 44 Massey Harris tractor with a Continental 6 cylinder engine.

   The starter drive had to be modified to fit the 360 engine and the oil filter had to be relocated so the rear of the engine would sit low enough to let the drive-shaft run fairly straight. The factory steering was removed and replaced with a hydrostatic (oil operated) steering unit from a 1660 Case combine. The Case combine steering cylinder was too light and soon broke so I used one from a 760 Massey Ferguson combine. The Case combine hydraulic pump was mounted on a Chrysler air-conditioning bracket on top of the engine and hydraulic controls were salvaged from a 95 Massey Ferguson tractor. With dual live hydraulics, I was ready to mount a loader on my creation.

  I bought a loader that fit a 9N Ford tractor from an antique tractor dealer nearby and, after some modifications, it fit my 55 perfectly.

  When I first put the old Massey to work I found that it had a heating problem. After working it for about ½ hour it would overheat forcing me to quit what I was doing and let it cool down. I didn’t think that it was a problem with the radiator since I had it completely cleaned before I installed it. Maybe the cooling fan? I replaced the 4 blade fan with a 6 blade one and also built a shroud around it to force the fan to move more air through the rad. No improvement. It seemed likely that it could be a gasket problem so I bought a set of head gaskets for the 360 and replaced the ones on the tractor. The problem persisted! Now what???

  It must be the engine.

  I removed the 360 and replaced it with a Chrysler Industrial 318 that had been on the aforementioned 1660 combine. Problem solved?

  Not quite!!!! The engine still overheated.

  After thinking about what else could be wrong I finally figured that I had the answer. With all the work I had done on the tractor with no improvement I had one other thing to try. I moved the radiator ahead 3 inches and lengthened the hood accordingly.

   Success at last! Problem solved!

  The V8 engine had been too close to the radiator and the width of the engine plus the hydraulic pump sitting on top meant that there was no room for the hot air from the rad to escape. Now I could finally put it to work.

  Since building this tractor I have used it for everything. We built our rental cabin using it to haul gravel for mixing concrete, for lifting the walls and for landscaping work. I have also worked summer fallow, loaded large, round hay bales and I now use it for snow plowing in the winter. It has done almost everything I have asked it to do and tho' the engine is a little low on torque, it is cheap to run and very handy around the yard.

  The story tells a lot faster than it originally played out but it was well worth the effort. I have never regretted the 6 weeks (plus the time spent ironing out the bugs) it took to build this tractor and I may just do another one some day (only this time I would lengthen the tractor frame and use a 360 V8 complete with automatic transmission).

  The original 4 cylinder engine burned between 4 and 5 imperial gallons of gas per hour. Neither the 360 engine nor the current 318 has ever used more than 21/2 gallons per hour and as an added bonus, if I need a tractor somewhere in a hurry, it will travel over 30 miles per hour. It pulls a 14 ft. deep-tillage cultivator quite well and I have pulled a 5 bottom Massey Harris plow with it.

  The Case hydrostatic steering on the 55 worked so well that when I mounted a loader on my 1964 model 930 Case tractor I went to the same setup on it. On this tractor, I used the steering control from a 1060 Case combine and modified a steering cylinder from 97 Massey Ferguson tractor and used it for steering the 930 and it works great!!

Update - Spring 2009

 The 318 engine in the old Massey finally quit. I had used the engine from the afore- mentioned 1660 Case combine and it served faithfully for about 7 years but it was DONE! It still didn’t burn any oil but it had other, more serious, internal problems.

  In the last few years I had acquired a number of 5542 White/Cockshutt combines of late 1960s vintage (4, to be exact) and they all had Chrysler 318 Industrial engines so the logical choice was to use one of them in the old Massey. I could have gone back to the original automotive 360 engine which had come from a ’76 Dodge car but the proper flywheel for that engine proved very difficult to obtain so the 318 was the engine of choice. (Though these 2 engines are physically identical and almost all parts interchange the flywheels are balanced differently and should not be installed on the wrong engine. I had done this back in ’98 but over a period of time it can take out the rear crankshaft main bearing, thereby destroying the engine.)

  When I had installed the first V8 in the tractor I had remodeled a ½ ton truck radiator to use on it because the fan sat so low that the tall tractor radiator wouldn’t work. That was all well and good at the time but the White/Cockshutt engines were built slightly different. On these 318s the water pump and cooling fan were placed higher to accommodate the combine hydraulic pump which was driven directly from the crankshaft.

    I made 2 decisions while contemplating the swap:

#1: On the old set-up the hydraulic pump sat on top and at the front of the engine and anytime there was an oil leak it made a mess on the engine. It also cluttered up the top of the engine with hoses. Since it was already designed for it I would retain the crankshaft driven hydraulic pump on this engine to keep any leaked oil under the engine.

#2: Since the fan sat so much higher on this engine I figured I would have to use the original rad and grill which were taller than the modified version I was taking off. This made the tractor look more like it did when it came from the factory 58 years ago (except for the V8 engine, of course!).

  I had contemplated using the engine governor that the White/Cockshutt engines had built into their distributor but I had exchanged the thirsty industrial carburetor for a much more economical automotive one, therefore I didn’t want to go to the hassle of building new linkages and hooking it all up.

  I had to make other minor changes as I went along, moving the rad a bit more ahead, lengthening the hood another ½ inch or so, rerouting the oil lines running from the hydraulic oil tank to the pump, moving the hydraulic oil filter from the suction line to the return line and building new mufflers for the dual exhausts.

             With all the changes I had to make and going through a 6 inch early spring snowfall (my shop is 160 acres of air-conditioned comfort) it took a couple of weeks to get the tractor running again. When the modifications were all done and I started using the tractor I was very pleased with the results. The muted roar of the new exhaust system was much easier on the ears than the old hollow pipes and the modified hydraulics worked perfectly.

  Due to the fact that the Massey transmission wasn’t meant to transfer the extra horsepower or travel at speeds in excess of 30 miles per hour (from the factory their speed was about 8 or 10) it is getting pretty noisy so my next project is finding another old tractor, maybe a McCormick Deering (International Harvester) W6, and mating the Massey Harris front frame complete with all modifications to it. The old McCormick’s top speed was about 18 MPH and, hopefully, it will handle speed a bit better.