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hey mack...i might not be the right guy to get in contact with if you're planning to make yours an original "green belly" again. my '55 TO-35 is red and gray also, and i plan to leave it that way. like i said before, you'll find alot of guys that know more about those colors on the harry ferguson forum. i don't know if you know it or not but you really are in the wrong forum for your tractor. the TO-35 wasnt called a massey ferguson until around 1960. your tractor is a "ferguson" TO-35. i don't know the exact history of the 35, but in 1953 or 4, i think massey harris called on old harry ferguson to design them a tractor with live PTO and a six speed tranny to compete with a ford model that had come out with those features. harry designed the TO-35 for them, but even tho it was sold "thru" massey, it was a "Ferguson" tractor until it was named, "massey ferguson" in 1960. this is kind of a rough history cuz i don't know all the details, but it's something like that. if your 35 still has the "badge" on the nose, or the emblems on the sides, you'll see that it says ferguson on it, and is different from the "MF" badge you see on later to-35's. oh...and if you carefully scratch thru the paint on that badge, you'll find that dark green as a background. there are quite a few disscussions about the colors. there are SO many early fergie 35's around that sport that red and gray, that alot of people still believe that some of them were originally painted that way. i've only seen one older fergie with the original paint (not repainted) that was green and gray ...and that was in a picture. ALL the others i've ever seen are...red and gray. i have my own theories about that but can't prove it. i wonder if massey dealers had a hard time selling that tractor in it's green and gray coat...so they took them new, into their shops and painted them red and gray, or ordered them or sent them back, to the factory for the massey colors to be put on them? oh...the '60 MF-35's WERE red and gray. the '57 and '58 fergie 35's were beige color sheet metal, and i forget what color chassis. you said your dad bought your tractor new and you remember it as always being red and gray. if he brought it home from the dealership red and gray...that would kind of back up my theory. is there anyway you could confirm that? it could also save you alot of color changing if you could say for sure that it WAS originally red and gray...from the dealership anyway. hope i helped you a little,
-mike
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