Dad’s Ford Model A

By Richard Stout
Published on September 5, 2014
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A 1929 Model A Ford pickup truck.
A 1929 Model A Ford pickup truck.
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A 1929 Ford Model AA truck.
A 1929 Ford Model AA truck.
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A 1930 Model A pickup with a 250-gallon water tank.
A 1930 Model A pickup with a 250-gallon water tank.
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The 1929 Roadster cut down into a pickup.
The 1929 Roadster cut down into a pickup.
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In this 1943 photo, Edgar Stout is at the wheel of his Ford-Ferguson 9N with homemade posthole digger.
In this 1943 photo, Edgar Stout is at the wheel of his Ford-Ferguson 9N with homemade posthole digger.
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A 1929 Ford Model AA with tank.
A 1929 Ford Model AA with tank.

My father was a believer in the McLean County, Ill., system of raising hogs on clean pasture. There was a well approximately in the center of his 160-acre farm. Each year he would have a clover field cornering against the well. He did that to be able to get water to the hog waterers by pipe or hose.

These pens were fan-shaped, 20 rods deep from the corner of the field. But as the three pens were only 16 feet wide at the narrow end, and as the hogs had a built-in roto-rooter attachment, the area in the point of the pens became big mud holes, which made getting feed and the hog buildings in and out of the pens difficult, especially when it was muddy. Evidently he decided to change the system, stringing the pens out so the hog waterers and feeders would be more isolated. He had to get water to the hogs some other way.

And that meant a lot of temporary fence every year. Anyone who has used a hand post auger to make postholes knows it is not an enjoyable job. In early 1943, Dad took a Model T rear end, a part of a car frame, a cut-down Gleaner combine auger, an IHC sliding PTO shaft — all of which he had on hand or got at the Mose Levy junkyard — up to Waggoner Welding in Washington (Dad did not have a welder) and got them welded into a posthole digger. He bolted that to the lift arms of his 9N Ford-Ferguson tractor to be able to raise and lower the auger.

It did dig postholes a lot faster and easier than you could do the job by hand. This was before 3-point posthole diggers existed. It had a tendency to corkscrew under certain conditions. It could also do a number on field tile. When you saw red tile chips coming up when boring a posthole, it did not help your humor because you knew you would then have to get a spade and dig it out by hand and fix the tile.

Recycling a roadster

The local loan company had repossessed a 1929 Model A Ford roadster. It ran and was cheap so my dad bought it. The reason it was cheap was because the former owner did not take his loss very well. He had gone out with the sledge and pounded all four fenders down to the tires. Dad got it home and pounded the fenders back up but that just made it usable, not good looking.

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