Ted's son helped with mechanical work; Ted handles the bodywork, sandblasting and painting. It didn't take long to decide on a color scheme.
"Most 1929 Rumely Oil Pulls were battleship gray," Ted said. "Very ugly. But this one's been painted in the original green - olive drab - and black."
At a time when good quality materials could mean an outlay of $700 just to paint the tractor, Ted felt like he had no choice but to try a less costly alternative.
"It comes out a beautiful job - if you do it by the directions."
That was over a year ago
"I had thought, last summer, that we'd take it to the state fair in September," he said. "But she was kind of fighting me a little bit. I just left it in the paint shop all winter."
The Rumely had waited before. Ted first got wind of the classic from a friend working hay nearby.
"He saw the Rumely from the barn," Ted said. "There was all kinds of machinery buried out there. It was a jungle. It'd been 40 years since it'd run, at least. It was out between two trees, and covered with vines. It was just a half-block off a pretty well travelled blacktop road, but no one could see it."
The real prize on Ted's Rumely also remains, uh, hidden. "On Rumelys, the hardest thing to find is the pressed-tin back valve cover with the Rumely tag, size and serial number," he said. "Most farmers just took it off and tossed it so they could hand-oil the rocker arm. But this one had it!"