A Challenging Project: General GG Tractor Restoration

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The tricycle-style General GG 10-19 tractor had a single front wheel with a tire size of 5.50×16. Cameron’s tractor sports all new tires.

While a seventh grader in Marion, Iowa, Cameron Luedtke built his own tractor. That wasn't what he called his 4-H project, nor how he thought about it at the time. But as it turned out, that's what he did.

"My father (Kurt Luedtke) bought this tractor at an auction in 1996," says Cameron, now 19. "He was going to restore it, but never got around to it because he got too busy. He took it apart and put it in a box, but that was as far as it got."

In 2002, Cameron figured he might be able to restore the farm tractor as a 4-H project. "That's how I got started on it," he says. And that's when the learning process began.

Tractor with no name

Cameron's grandpa Willis Lillie restores tractors, so together they pulled the tractor parts out of the barn. It didn't take the pair long to discover that they didn't know what kind of tractor it was. "The parts were similar to the B.F. Avery tractor, and overall it looked something like that too," Cameron says, "but when we started looking at the fine details, we saw some parts were different."

Grandpa came to the rescue, digging up a calendar showing a tractor manufactured by Cleveland Tractor Company (Ohio) called the General GG 10-19. "We noticed some parts on our tractor were different from parts on the B.F. Avery," Cameron says, "including the grille, which was the same as the grille on the General tractor in the calendar."

Another part of the learning curve for Cameron was figuring out which parts were missing, which were unusable and which were usable. The inventory came out this way, he says: front and rear tires were rotted, clutch and motor parts were missing, and the piston rings, generator bearing, gaskets, wiring harness, clutch, hoses, decals and back rims were either suspect or unusable.

To complicate matters, Cameron and his granddad discovered the tractor frame had been cut and shortened. "I couldn't tell you then why it was done and I couldn't tell you now," he says. "It must have been too long." So a new frame was required.

On the plus ledger, most of the sheet metal was all right, with the grille, hood, fender and gas tank looking good, and the steering wheel was usable. But everything needed work. "Using an angle-grinder and wire brush," he recalls, "I had to clean all those metal parts up and get them ready for painting."