Straight To The Point

With hard ground and difficulty in getting his plough to penetrate, Andrew Hall sets about fitting some new points

I needed a second plough to enable me to plough along with my son and pressed one into service. It hadn’t been used for some time, so I dropped it into some wheat stubble with my MF 550 to help shine it up, and despite the hard ground it penetrated well.

The first match came along and we both entered, with my son on the FE 35 using my original plough and myself with the 550 and the second semidigger plough. Hard stony conditions prevailed and the FE 35 ploughed with no problem, as it always has done, but once I’d made my opening runs I couldn’t get my plough to penetrate at all. If there had been a min-till award, I would have won it outright!

The next match involved trailering the tractors due to the distance, so I decided to use my TE-D 20 with the plough, as it is lighter to transport. The result? Exactly as before and to save wasting my fuel and embarrassment, I pulled out of the match. With at least one more match to attend, and having to use the same plough, I had to take action.

A look on Westlake Plough Parts’ website (www.westlakeploughparts. com) yielded a pair of points to suit the plough, which were sent immediately. The names of plough parts vary according to the region of the country. In the south we tend to refer to shares as points, but in the Ferguson plough manual they are known as shares. The bracket that holds all the wearing parts to the leg is often called the frog, but the Ferguson manual refers to them as saddles.