From the Ground Up: The Challenge of Implement Restoration

Woody Cone offers his experience with a couple of challenging implement restorations.

By Woody Cone
Updated on May 9, 2022
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by Woody Cone
The restored Deering mower.

I usually restore antique tractors, typically John Deere. When I got the chance to buy a really nice but rusty antique Deering mowing machine, I thought, “wouldn’t it be neat to try and make that look like it just came off the showroom floor?” So I went online to see if I could find out what it would have originally looked like.

I bought the machine and dismantled it so that I could clean and paint each individual piece. I made a swath board from a piece of oak that I’d had forever. The drawbar was a problem. The one that came on it was a hardwood 2-by-4, but it was a long way from looking like new. I didn’t have a hardwood 2-by-4, but I did have a piece of oak that was a 1-by-8 board. So I split it down the middle and glued the two halves together to make a 2-by-4.

I sandblasted the parts that would fit in the sandblaster and cleaned everything else with a wire brush on an offset grinder. I painted the parts and then tried to reassemble them without scratching the paint. I think it came out looking pretty good. In the end, I had no place to store the mower under cover so I put it up for sale. I would have loved to keep it, but there is a lot of satisfaction just knowing what I did.

This year I decided to restore a corn sheller I’d had for several years. When I first acquired this sheller, I put it by my shed and covered it with a cheap tarp. Two years in a row the spring runoff backed up and put the sheller under about 4 feet of water. Then the tarp went to pieces and the sheller sat out in the New England weather for another three or four years.

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