your first restoration

I'm currently working on a 1947 JD M for a friend of mine. Doing a complete tear-down and restoration. This is my second restoration and is an absolute joy to take part in. I would love to hear some of your stories about your first restoration. What kind of difficulties did you encounter? How did you come across your tractor? What did it look like when you got it? I look forward to hearing your stories. I'll start with mine in a follow up post. God bless.

--old fashioned farmer

For many years I watched as my grandpa worked his land. Unfortunately I was never old enough to help. By the time I was old enough, he was far along in years and not farming like he used to. I still had no real way to get into the farming like I wanted to since all the farming had been leased to a neighbor. I had the notion that the best way for me to get into the farming was to buy my own tractor so I could do some work myself. So I set out to find myself a tractor. We raise around 1/2 to 3/4 of an acre of tobacco each year and that was my starting place for farming. I had seen a tractor in my calendars a few times that really caught my eye for this crop: the Farmall A. It looked so beautiful with it's shiny red paint and side-set engine. I set out to find one in January of 1999. I placed an ad in our local paper and didn't have to wait too long before I got a response. A fella a few miles from home had an old farmall that he wanted to sell. Dad and I went to see it on a saturday morning and needless to say I was in for a little surprise. There sat this dirty, greasy, barely red farmall in front of the garage of the late Mr. Harry Booso. I was by no means an expert (at the time) in diagnosing the condition of the tractor so I let dad do the lookover. We asked Harry if he'd start it for us since he said it was running at the time. He proceeded to the breather cap, removed it, shot a good long shot of ether into the pipe and then went for the starter. It fired up and clicked right along like a sewing machine. I had grown up around two cylinders but this four cylinder went right to my heart. Upon looking the tractor over I found that it had remnants of a decal on the front with the word "culti-vision" on it and had a large cylinder like object mounted on its side. I thought I had something rare on my hands. I later learned the truth about these two things and a few other things on the tractor that weren't as rare as I thought (like the exhaust pipe that looked like a steel whiskey juge with pipes in both ends). Harry told us that his brother had given him this tractor and that it hadn't been used since he got it. He had a plow, cultivators, and a disk that went with it. I was very excited as we left that morning and wanted that tractor. We called him a few days later to bargain a price. He wanted $1000 for the whole deal. He claimed he had $1000 in it. I thought his brother had given it to him. To say the least, we got the price down to $700 when all was said and done. We borrowed a friend's tilt trailer to pick it up. This caused an interesting problem. It turned out the hole in the truck's bumper wasn't large enough to hold the ball hitch for their trailer. We had to spend a good bit of time drilling a new hole in the bumper and then we were off. It was raining when we got there so getting the tractor loaded was interesting. It spun with both wheels as it climbed that trailer but it was soon in place and we were headed down the steep and somewhat icy hill toward the main highway and home. The next few months didn't have any restoring in them. I used that tractor to plow, cultivate and mow pastures. It came June and I decided I wanted to be in the local machinery show in August. That gave us about a month to get the job done. We did. I'll save that part of the story for another time though. God bless.

--old fashioned farmer