The serial number on the tractor in the story is 404758, and my tractor is serial no. 401511. The manual also shows a 3-inch bore and a 4 3/8-inch stroke.
My tractor still runs, but it needs a good carburetor.
- Marion Grant, 9315 E. Day Road, Mead, WA 99021; (509) 466-2245
Digging up dirt on SIMAR
I have nine SIMAR machines of different sizes and versions. These machines are not as rare as the men in the article think. I keep an unofficial registry for all rototiller brands in the U.S. from the hundreds of e-mails I receive from my Web site. I have not kept the spreadsheet up to date, but between the spreadsheet and names that need to be entered, I know about more than 100 SIMAR machines. Jason Andrews and Robert Urich are not on my list; they will be now.
I will admit Urich's C30 is not a model I have on my list. The number 13458 would be the machine serial number, not a patent number. The engine serial number is on a small brass tag on the left side of the housing for the flywheel. He did a nice job of restoring it.
Too bad Andrew didn't mention the model numbers of his two machines. Model numbers varied from year to year, a C30 was also called a type 3, 30, 30B, 31C, C3, C4 and others with no particular pattern.
The cylindrical gas tank on the handle bar is not unique to SIMAR. What is unique is the fact that the air filter is running through the center of the gas tank.
Rototiller Co. started importing the German Siemens K5 in 1930; Siemens sold the motor-cultivator line to another German firm, Bungartz, in 1934. Rototiller continued to import the improved K6 until 1937.
Rototiller Inc. of Troy, N.Y., imported the SIMAR from 1932 to 1939 when the war in Europe began. E.C. Geiger Co. of North Wales, Pa., began importing them sometime in the 1950s until about 1975. SIMAR went out of business in 1982.