1963 County Super-4: where we start
The first of the two machines in this project is a 1963 County Super-4.
If you have not met one before: County Commercial Cars of Fleet, Hampshire took the Fordson Super Major skid unit and made it drive all four wheels. Not a small front axle bolted under the nose, either — four wheels of equal size, with drive taken from a transfer box at the rear and carried forward by twin propshafts, one running along each side of the tractor to a bevel box at each front hub. It is an unmistakable layout, and it gave the County a reputation for pulling in conditions that stopped conventional tractors dead.
That same layout is what makes the restoration interesting. Underneath, this is a Fordson, and Fordson parts are still reasonably well served by specialists. Everything County added on top is a narrower world of used spares, specialist remanufacture, and — where a part turns out to be genuinely unobtainable — measuring, drawing and making a new one.
The order of work
No paint, no polishing, nothing pretty for a good while yet. The plan is deliberately dull and deliberately in this order:
- Photograph and record everything before a single fastener is disturbed. Overall shots, then detail shots of every assembly, every decal, every cable route. You cannot go back for a photograph you did not take.
- Fluids out. Drain fuel, engine oil, transmission and hydraulic oil, and coolant, and look hard at what comes out. Water in a hub oil or a mayonnaise-coloured engine oil changes the plan for the whole machine.
- The fuel system. The fuel lift pump comes off, the tank gets flushed, and nothing is asked of the engine until it has clean fuel to run on.
- The driveline survey. Play, seals and oil condition at the front drive axle, the side propshafts and the front hubs — measured and written down, not eyeballed.
- The steering. Free play recorded at the rim before the steering box, track rod ends and kingpins are judged individually, because the slack is always shared between them.
Only when all of that is on paper does anything come apart properly. A restoration that starts with the spanners rather than the notebook is a restoration that ends up buying the same part twice.
What goes in the wiki
Every part that gets pulled, assessed or replaced gets an entry in the parts wiki, with its status, its original part number where we can establish one, and a downloadable model where reproducing the part turns out to be the sensible answer. The County entries and the Super Dexta entries are kept separate throughout — they are two different machines, and a part that fits one has no business being assumed to fit the other.
More as the fluids come out.