When an engine sits for years without running, the oil breaks down and turns to sludge. Moisture gets in and causes rust. The piston rings fuse to the cylinder walls. The valves stick in their guides. The bearings corrode. To fix it, you have to take the entire engine apart. Piece by piece. You have to remove the head, pull the pistons, extract the crankshaft. You have to clean every component, replace what can’t be saved, and machine what can. Then you have to put it all back together perfectly or it won’t work.
Professional mechanics charged hundreds of dollars for this kind of work. Dale didn’t have hundreds of dollars. He had $75 worth of rust and a set of his father’s tools, so he taught himself. He got books from the library, farm all repair manuals, machinist handbooks, engineering texts. He studied them at night after working the fields with borrowed equipment. During the day, he learned about cylinder boring, crankshaft grinding, valve seat cutting. He learned which parts could be salvaged and which had to be replaced.
And every weekend, every spare hour, he worked on that engine. The neighbors thought he was crazy. Vernon Krebs drove by once, saw Dale elbow deep in the engine block, and laughed so hard he almost drove into a ditch. Word spread around the county about the Perkins boy and his hopeless project. That tractor’s never going to run. People said at the feed store, at the diner, at church, $75 down the drain. They said Walter Perkins must be spinning in his grave.
They said Dale heard all of it and he kept working. Let me tell you about what Dale found and what he didn’t find in that first year. By the fall of 1969, Dale had the engine apart. Every piece was laid out on his workshop floor, labeled and cataloged. The damage was extensive, but not hopeless. The cylinder walls were scored, but could be bored oversiz. The crankshaft had surface rust, but no deep pitting. The cam shaft was good.
The block itself, despite 17 years in a barn, was solid. But one thing puzzled him. When he drained the crank case, expecting to find the usual sludge of degraded oil, he’d found something else. The oil was dark and thick, yes, but it had been topped off recently. Well, recently, by 1952 standards, someone had added fresh oil to the engine not long before it was parked. More than that, the oil pan had been sealed. not just bolted on, but sealed with some kind of waterproof compound that had kept moisture out for 17 years.
