In 1951 the company decided to manufacture a potato harvester in their new light engineering shop. Manufacturing rights were purchased from Robert Crawford of Boston, Lincolnshire, an agricultural engineering company.

Initial development work (before ABC's involvement in the project) was carried out by the Scunthorpe Welding and Light Engineering Company on farming land in Lincolnshire. The new machine was called the Wota - Crawford Potato Harvester and prototypes were built in Park Lane and displayed at all of the major agricultural shows including the prestigeous Smithfield Show at Earls Court and the Royal Show at Oxford.

Nationwide potato harvesting trials began and distributors were appointed.


The Wota - Crawford Potato Harvester.

 The harvester was designed to harvest the maximum crop with the minimum amount of damage and constructed to handle many hundreds of tons of soil, stones, potatoes and haulms every working day.

Three acres of potatoes could be handled daily, scrubbed free of soil, sorted and automatically bagged. Alternatively they could be directly loaded into a cart running alongside.
The potatoes were lifted whole from the soil by two adjustable shares at the front onto the elevator. They were elevated onto the sorting platform and cleaned at the same time. 

Alongside the elevator can be seen the scrubber belt, fitted with adjustable slats. It moved faster than the elevator and helped to clean the potatoes as they were conveyed upwards. The cleaning process was assisted by agitating the elevator belt.
A front view of the harvester with the elevator for cart loading on the right.


Another view of the harvester.

 The harvester was attached to the tractor by a floating head bar at the front and two floating elbow draw bars at the rear. It could be attached by a three man team in fifteen minutes and operated as a single unit.

Behind the tractor was the sorting conveyer on which the potatoes could be hand sorted. On the right hand side of the tractor is a platform that could carry six or more loaded sacks.

The harvester could be operated by a team of 4 men consisting of the tractor driver, 2 sorters and a sack handler.
Below the sorter's platform can be seen the retractable road wheel operated by a handle in the centre of the platform. On the right of the platform was a lever to control the depth of the shares.


The sorter's platform.


A close-up view of the sorter's platform.

 The drive was taken from the tractor's power take-off and transmitted via bevel gears through sprockets and malleable chains.

This view shows the sack platform. On the right the sacks are loaded from the conveyer and stacked at the front of the platform for collection.
 


A side view of the harvester.
ABC spent large sums of money on the project but it all came to nothing in the end. The development work had been carried out on easily workable land in the Lincolnshire fens and not on the heavy clay or stoney soils that are found elsewhere. As a result the machines couldn't cope with the heavier soils and so were unusable in most areas. It was a case of insufficient research and development.

The harvesters were rejected by the farming community and less than 20 were made. The project was a financial disaster for the company and must have contributed towards their eventual demise.

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