One-time payment · No subscription
The free decoder tells you the year. This kit is everything else you should check before money changes hands on a 70-year-old tractor — written for the four families our decoders cover, and built from the same cross-checked sources.
$39 one time
One per family: where the number lives, what a genuine stamping or plate looks like, and the re-stamp red flags — numbers that are too neat, plates with fresh rivets and old holes, digits that don't match the family's stamp alphabet.
Included in the $39 Buyer's Check Kit
Serial vs casting dates, step by step, with the code tables for Ford, IH and the UK MF 35. This is the check that catches the swapped engine and the parts tractor wearing one good serial plate.
Included in the $39 Buyer's Check Kit
The mid-production changes that make the exact year worth money: the 8N's distributor move, the Deere A frame break at 584000, the late-styled B at 201000, Fast-Hitch timing on the Super C, the MF 135 clutch split. Order parts by the wrong side of a split and you learn why this section exists.
Included in the $39 Buyer's Check Kit
Per family: compression signs you can check in a farmyard, hydraulics, PTO, clutch and gearbox, steering wear, and tires read as a budget line — the four-figure surprise nobody mentions at auctions.
Included in the $39 Buyer's Check Kit
What actually moves the price: first/last-year serials, originality vs restoration quality, wide fronts, live PTO, factory options, and the auction-day quick-price card for the models that change hands most.
Included in the $39 Buyer's Check Kit
Most vintage tractors have no title. What a good bill of sale for untitled equipment should say, lien and estate-sale cautions, and how to record the serial so the tractor's identity survives the sale.
Included in the $39 Buyer's Check Kit
Get the Buyer's Check Kit — $39
One payment of $39. The kit is a web page you can open on your phone in the farmyard — no account, no subscription, nothing else to buy.
Because the year is the only question a free decoder should answer — and it is about 10% of a buying decision. A $2,800 8N with a swapped engine and a parts-tractor rear end is not a $2,800 tractor. The sellers who know these checks use them; this kit puts the same checks in the buyer's pocket, in plain language, family by family.
No. One payment of $39, once. There is no account and nothing renews.
The four decoder families: Ford N-series & NAA, Farmall letter series and Supers, John Deere two-cylinders (A, B, H, M) and the 50, and Massey Ferguson 135 / MF 35 / Ferguson TO. The checks are written per family, not generic.
The decoder stays free forever and the kit links back to it. The kit assumes you have a year (or a missing-plate problem — it covers that too) and takes it from there.