Restoring tractors
A FORMER FARMER HAS SPENT SIX DECADES RESTORING HIS COLLECTION OF TRACTORS AND FARM TRUCKS
Meet Oamaru sheddies Colin Harvey who sold his farm and came to town to immerse himself into restoring tractors
Sheep have always been an evil necessity and dairy cows are not much better. Just ask former sheep and dairy farmer Colin Harvey — give a man a truck or a tractor any time, he says. So when he and his wife Catherine converted their farm near Papakaio in North Otago’s Waitaki Valley from sheep to dairy in the 1980s, he successfully avoided the milking shed and raised beef cattle; managed the operation, including a run-off block; and did the tractor work. And for some six decades he has been buying, restoring, and selling tractors and farm trucks.
Gathering tractors
Colin bought his first tractors in partnership with his brother, Neville, in 1964. They were a second-hand Allis-Chalmers (AC) Model B and a new Fiat 513R wheel tractor. He later bought
them from the partnership, and after a few years purchased another AC B and a D270 AC wheel tractor.
All these were used as part of the normal farming operation. At this time, they were farming 6000 sheep on the irrigated farm, with water supplied from the Lower Waitaki Irrigation Scheme. They traded the Fiat 513R for a Fiat 650 and bought three more Fiat 650s over time, followed by two New Holland four-wheel-drive wheel tractors, a 95LH and 85LH.
Then, successively, Colin added an AC Model M wide-track crawler to his fleet. His father, Hector Harvey, had bought this very machine new in 1937 when he was farming at Duntroon. And on the day he bought back his father’s old M wide-track, Colin went to a clearing sale and bought another AC M; this one was a narrow-track model.
“I bought them with the intention of restoring and selling them on”
Restoring and selling
The AC make was part of the family history, Colin says, and for that reason he bought and restored them in preference to other makes.
“I bought them with the intention of restoring and selling them on,” he says. “I like farm machines. They are more predictable than the animals.
“In the mid 1950s, Dad had upgraded to a Bedford truck and sold his 1934 Chev truck, which he’d bought secondhand in 1937, to one of his brothersin-law, Ian Francis at Duntroon. After Uncle Ian died in 1995, the family offered me the truck.”
Colin towed the old Chevy to where he was then farming at Papakaio, further down the Waitaki Valley towards Oamaru.
“More recently I bought a second 1934 Chev which had belonged to Richardson’s truck museum in Invercargill — they were selling surplus vintage vehicles. At the auction two gentlemen came up to me and one told me his father — a Mr Fleming, who had a transport company at Tuatapere — had bought the truck new in 1934,” he says.
Colin has worked on and sold a further six tractors over the years.
“I like farm machines. They are more predictable than the animals”
A bigger shed needed
Prior to retiring from farming in 2008 it took Colin a year to find a suitable building to house and restore his vehicles. He works out of two sheds in Tees Street, on the edge of Oamaru’s Victorian precinct. The property had previously been used by a company called ‘Timbertech’ and before that by the Tempero family as a coachbuilding site.
The front building takes two trucks and four tractors with plenty of room for the trailer that will eventually transport them to vintage vehicle shows. The back shed houses three wheel-tractors, two crawler-tractors, plus all the tools, and there are plenty of these.
For the most part Colin uses the normal mechanic’s tools: socket sets, ring and open-ended spanners, hammers and screwdrivers, pliers, electrical drills, grinders, spray-painting equipment, a hydraulic press, a bearing puller. He has recently extended the range of equipment by adding an overhead gantry and an engine lifter. When he was on the farm, he used a lathe, and also several front-end-loader tractors with forks that did the heavy lifting, but he disposed of those at the farm’s clearing sale.
There’s little chance of Colin running out of work to do in the sheds
Sidetracked
He is the first to admit that his workspaces are not often neat and tidy, but he made a special effort for our photographer, saying, “Our two daughters are shocked at the state of the sheds. But our son James, who lives in England, loves to help out when he’s here.”
After moving into the Tees Street sheds in 2009, Colin’s first project was to reconstruct a front-end loader on a Fiat 650 tractor.
“I bought the loader that had been on another tractor and had to make up a new frame to fit onto the Fiat 650 tractor. It took two or three years,” he tells us.
Five years ago he started stripping one of the AC M crawlers; cleaning it, undercoating it …
“And that job’s still not finished,” he says. “I got sidetracked two years ago into working on restoring a Connor Shea direct drill, which I have completed and sold as a working machine. The guy who bought it said he didn’t want to use it because it looked so new. Then there have been other jobs, like making up the frame for the trailer. Before I retired, I bought the trailer at a clearing sale out Enfield way and I’m putting a frame onto it to transport vehicles to town,” Colin says.
Plenty to do
His current project is the restoration of the AC M crawler, narrow gauge: “I’ve got to finish stripping it — dismantling and cleaning, then top-coating and reassembling it. Beyond that I was going to do Dad’s crawler but time being what it is … The 1934 Chev truck is a major piece of work. It needs a new cab plus general overhauling and a new engine. I’ll do the cab/coach building myself but get a mechanic for the engine. We’ll see how we go.”
There’s little chance of Colin running out of work to do in the sheds: “Two years ago, I went to a clearing sale at Kingsman Estate in Fairlie and purchased an AC D272 wheel tractor and in March last year I purchased a third Chev 1934 truck from Wellington. It’s still got the original 1934 motor, which I intend to overhaul.”
All this might imply that the man is an inveterate grease monkey but there’s more to Colin Harvey than his obsession with buying and restoring vintage farm machines.
In 1990 he and wife Catherine took their first trip together to the US to visit friends and family. They enjoyed the experience of encountering new people and places so much that they began to take regular trips to more exotic places. “We’ve been away for six to 10 weeks over winter every year since 2012,” he says. “We get a lot out of going to new places and getting to know different cultures. The truth is, as much as I like the restoration work, in fact it fits in around the travelling.”