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.
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.
