Clarence Hollister had been a farmer back in the 40s and 50s, a quiet man with a small operation north of town. He died in 1952 and his widow had moved to California shortly after, leaving everything behind. The farm had been sold, but the equipment had sat in a barn for 17 years, waiting for an estate to be settled. Now, finally, it was being auctioned off, and among the rusty harrows and broken plows, there was a 1948 Farm All M that had once been Clarence Hollister’s pride and joy.
Dale didn’t know anything about Clarence Hollister. He just knew that a farmall M was essentially the same tractor as his father’s SuperM, which meant he knew how to work on it. And he knew that $75 was all he could afford. What he didn’t know was that Clarence Hollister had left something behind, something hidden in that engine block for 17 years, something worth more than anyone at that auction could have imagined. But that discovery was 16 years away.
First, Dale had to get the tractor home. Let me tell you about the first week because that’s when most people would have given up. Dale borrowed a flatbed trailer from a neighbor, one of the few who would still lend to him after his father’s debts became known and hauled the farm all m back to his farm. It took four men to push the tractor onto the trailer because the wheels wouldn’t turn and the steering was frozen solid.
When they finally got it into Dale’s barn, Vernon Krebs’s words seemed prophetic. The tractor was worse than it had looked at the auction. The engine was seized, just as Vernon had predicted. 17 years of sitting had turned the oil to varnish and welded the pistons to the cylinder walls. The transmission was full of mouse nests and corroded gears. The electrical system was a tangle of frayed wires and crumbling insulation. The hydraulics were frozen. The radiator leaked from six different places.
Dale spent the first night just staring at it, wondering if he’d made the worst mistake of his life. Then he remembered something his father used to say. Every broken machine is just a puzzle waiting to be solved. You just have to find the first piece. The first piece, Dale decided, was the engine. Now, let me pause here and talk about what it takes to rebuild a seized engine. Because most people don’t understand what Dale was attempting. A seized engine isn’t just stuck, it’s damaged.
