Our New Farm Equipment

     I've seen plenty inventive cost effective ways of plowing on homesteading blogs from pigs, dogs, horses, tractors, rot-o-tillers, and even people power.  We were looking for a cost effective solution as well, and stumbled across Mother Earth News' article from 1982 and quickly found what we imagined to be our simple solution!  (Or, so we thought.)  Since Craigslist is the new newspaper classifieds, we figured we'd start there and eventually found a poor man's tractor for a reasonable price, followed by an assortment of attachments for reasonable prices.  They all needed a little bit of elbow grease to put them into working order, but to the Mr. they appeared to be a treasure trove of possibility (and to me, I admit, a fairly rusty-looking pile of metal that still had glimmers of its old red paint scheme with their remaining rusting and bent model number tags in a disarray).

     When our David Bradley Super Power Garden Tractor was new back in 1951, it would have come straight out of the catalog from Sears, Roebuck & Co. and had an astounding 14 attachments to its name, with over a dozen other attachments added to its fieldwork arsenal throughout the next decade.  Now it's 2015, and that 64-year-old antique is beginning to show its age.  I've had more than one relative raise their eyebrows at the notion we are attempting to "Farm with an antique!?"  But, it's so much more than 64 years of painted and manicured rust!  Toted as a time-saving and labor-saving device, the 1952 catalog boasted that it could "Do more work than seven men" with tools that were built like large farm implements.  Behind this metal beast was a 2 1/4 horse power, "super power" engine "for top performance and heavy work"; an engine that is now dwarfed by the power of the one that sits on our portable generator.

In 1952, this was a reasonable advertisement in the
Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s catalog.

     The original David Bradley garden tractor had been released in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression and the line continued through 1964.  During this time the country was gripped by depression, its eligible young men (and married men like my great grandfather) turned out to wartime service, and then came back with a boom to a multitude of veterans marrying, raising families and finding the stereotypical American Dream in suburbia with a small rancher surrounded by a manicured lawn inside a white picket fence with a happily barking dog and two children.  It was picture perfect America.

Ad for the David Bradley Tri-Cut in 1958

     As a twenty-first century woman, I can attest that a lot has changed since the apparently picture perfect 1950s when this garden tractor was considered the workhorse of the "sun-down farmers" suburban home.  Every advertisement for the garden tractor during the decade showed a man behind the handles tending to his vegetable garden.    Where's my tractor to play work on?  Apparently, I'd have to wait until 1958 when the David Bradley Tri-Cut (lawnmower) with a push button electric start and no clutch but "simple levers" came onto the scene with a woman on top of it.  Don't worry, I could "mow in comfort and safety" as the machine actually does "all the work."  Thank goodness it's 2015, and I might actually get the chance to play work with our Super Power too!

     As I previously mentioned, our David Bradley Super Power was showing its age.  We somehow managed to lug the thing home, not kill ourselves or the machine as we unloaded it from the back of a pick-up, and get it safely to the ground so we could fill it with some gasoline and new oil and test it out.  (According to the man that sold it to us, it has been running in the spring, and we had done a few quick movement tests before we bought it to show that seemingly what needed to be operating was.)  So in went the fluids.  The Mr. wrapped the pull-start cord around the motor, and gave it a yank as I held onto the handles while positioned on our sulky.  Nothing.  We tried again.  And again.  And again.  Still nothing.  Greeeaaatttt.

     That's when I realized that antique second-hand machinery from a catalog was actually a blessing.  Unlike the multitude of automobiles, trucks and machinery out there today that is computer-chipped, something from 1951 (when computers were the size of an entire room) isn't about to have a chip in it, so it becomes a lot easier to fix it yourself.  Sears, Roebuck & Co. made our lives even easier.  You see, every David Bradley Super Power Garden Tractor would have come from Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s catalog so it would have been shipped in parts packed inside wooden crates to the individual who purchased it.  That also means that it came with a 19-page instruction  manual on how to assemble, troubleshoot and run the machinery, and the engine itself came with a separate 19-page instruction manual as well detailing the same three things.  That computes to 38 pages of help for us!  Thanks to the multitude of David Bradley collectors out there a website was already created that had gathered all the manuals we needed, and if a manual tells you how to put something together, then you can be sure, you can also take it apart!

I'm still not sure what was easier, seeing something first
hand or looking at the two-dimensional sketches of a
machine, as both appeared quite foreign to me.

     Throughout the course of the next few weeks we got to try our hands at a variety of tasks, and the Mr. got to attempt to teach me what various parts were on the David Bradley.  There was the disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling a carburetor whose fuel reservoir looked like a heavy snow with the float cemented firmly in the middle of it... taking apart a stuck engaged ball lock clutch (thankfully we couldn't get it started our first time or I would have been in for a wild ride)... tracking down a replacement glass fuel bowl as ours was cracking on the outside and held together with wax, but still sound-ish on the inside... tracking down a replacement clutch facing as the one had rusted and broke into seemingly a zillion pieces... and finally replacing the original spark plug with a new one after we couldn't get it to spark (later to find out that the old one sparked anyways as there was a different issue.  Don't worry the original plug's back in the garden tractor now.)

     After spending hours and hours, we got what I once thought was a very rusty, non-functioning, over-priced lawn ornament running (with an additional two hours of help from our landlord's farmhand who appeared a little skeptical at first).  I have to admit, I was more than excited!  Finally our own piece of garden? farm? equipment working!  There was only one problem (other than the oil spewing into the air like Old Faithful and the gasoline running in a steady trickle down the edge of the engine like a slightly dried up Niagara Falls): once you made the needed adjustments it was either in constant motion or no motion at all.  Ugh.  Back to the shed it went, where we tore it apart even further this time, but at least with the satisfactory feeling that we saw it run... away down the driveway that is.

      A few days later, we pulled it back out of the shed into the driveway.  Apparently there was a ball bearing issue, or a gasoline issue, or a clutch issue, or a choke issue, or... we tinkered around with so much we're not quite sure what actually did it in the end.  There were no Niagara Falls.  No Old Faithful.  No perpetual motion.  Just a David Bradley Super Power with its fading paint looking a little sparkly after having who-knows how many quarts of oil and gasoline wiped from it.  The only thing left was to hook up the sulky and test it out!

     Surrounded by conservative Mennonite and Amish farmers, as well as small scale and industrialized farms with their tried-and-true farming techniques and implements, I once again saw us as the spectacle of the neighborhood as we each took a turn around the yard, proudly perched on the seat of the sulky behind a running David Bradley.

     Much to the Mr.'s dismay, I now see the operating David Bradley with a sulky as a riding tractor instead of a walk behind, meaning for him, it will be an even longer wait until he can get a real riding John Deere.  (For some reason, he disagrees...)