- Related Articles
- IRON AGE ADS
- Just Toolin' Around
- Lets Talk Rusty Iron
Back On Track
By Leslie C. McDaniel Photos by G. Wayne Walker Jr.
In retirement, Jerry Toews has seen life slow to a, uh, crawl. And he couldn't be happier. A collector of steam engines, gas engines and tractors for 35 years, he has no difficulty picking out the prize of his collection: a 1915 tracklayer.
"That Holt 75 is one of my favorites," he said. "I just like the way it looks. It's not like a traditional tractor - it's open. You can see all the operating parts. It's real primitive looking, but it's functional, a real workhorse. And I like the way the engine works: it has tremendous torque at low RPM. People think it's going to die, but it just continues to pull."
The Holt, of course, wasn't always picture-perfect. Jerry bought the tractor in California in 1994, and had it delivered to his home in Kansas.
Fortunately, along with a mountain of parts came a parts manual, complete with detailed listings and illustrations of all of the tractor's parts. Jerry spent the winter categorizing parts, becoming familiar with the tractor. "It all started making sense," he said.
Although he's retired now, when he bought the Holt, he was teaching school. That meant he had the summer free, allowing him to clean and repair parts.
"I worked on it from dark to dark," he said. "That's all I did. And at the end of the summer, I had a lot of it together. But I hadn't started it yet." That would come early the following summer.
A lifetime as a collector and tinkerer (by the time Jerry left home for college, his father ordered a sale of Jerry's fleet of fixer-uppers that filled the yard) prepared him well for the Holt. The project held no overwhelming challenges, Jerry said.
"Oh, there were a few parts missing," he said, but replacements or castings were readily obtained through another collector on the west coast. The tractor does have an almost completely new undercarriage: the original track pads were made from stamped steel rather than cast pad, and were worn out. New pads were stamped and installed.
Jerry's Holt was manufactured in Stockton, Calif., in 1915. The tracklayer was Benjamin Holt's answer to the rich, soft peat soil of the San Joaquin Valley, which routinely swallowed up steel-wheeled steam tractors.