New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Love of tractors turns Greenwich teen into TikTok star
GREENWICH — Most TikTok users tune into the social media platform to watch videos of people dancing, doing silly tricks and throwing together meals.
But Andrew Hanna, a mechanical whiz-kid from Greenwich, has a completely different following from around the country — and around the world — for his own unique speciality: fixing up old farm tractors and making them run again.
Hanna, known as Drew, 17, has 230,000 followers on TikTok, who watch him strip, clean, tinker, restore and repair old tractors. He has gotten 4.3 million likes on TikTok, and also has a huge following on YouTube.
“It’s fun for me,” the Greenwich High School senior said. “What I love doing is figuring things out.”
Hanna is following a family tradition of sorts. His father, Timothy Hanna, grew up on a farm in Tennessee. Timothy’s uncle from Michigan was a farmer and veterinarian, and, when he passed away, he left behind a collection of old-time farm equipment that eventually became a hobby for Andrew. The teenage tinkerer fixed up his first tractor when he was 14, and now he knows just about everything there is to know about gears, crank shafts, fly wheels, carburetors, bearings, tire mounts and magnetos.
Hanna is part of a larger community of hobbyists who love old tractors and farm equipment, and he’s found an appreciative audience on the internet.
With just an Apple iPhone and a GoPro camera, he has reached thousands of other tinkerers and mechanics who watch him work on old tractor engines in a plainspoken but engaging manner, combining heartland America with up-to-the-minute social media interaction. He also connects with fellow mechanics who come to him for guidance and advice. “I try to answer as many people as I can,” he says.
“I genuinely love this kid’s videos,” wrote one of Hanna’s fans, Luke McFadden, a regular follower on TikTok from Maryland.
“Killin’ it bro, need more guys like you in my field,” said a TikTok follower from Nantucket, Alexander Woodley, who is a marine engineer.
The old farm vehicles are generally easy to repair and maintain, because they were designed to be rugged and easily fixable in the field by farm workers who did not need advance training to swap out a busted flywheel. But Hanna is something of a naturally gifted mechanic, says his father.
“He has a lot of intuition, he can visualize things, that’s amazing,” said Timothy Hannah, a former energy trader who now works as a contractor, “He’s fearless. There’s an old joke that ‘carburetor’ is French for ‘do not touch.’ But he just dives right in,” and repairs the notoriously difficult engine component that mixes air and fuel, his father said. “And he knows the electrical stuff, too.”
Drew Hanna has also been sharing his hobby at local events, including the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Greenwich Avenue and Memorial Day observances in Old Greenwich, driving his 1952 John Deere tractor down the town’s streets. The young mechanic has also been turning up at local fairs around the region, such as the recent Goshen Fair, taking part in tractor-pull competitions.
Hanna has scoured the internet and other databases to find usermanuals and diagrams for old tractor equipment, but the really hard part of his hobby is getting spare parts. It takes a fair amount of determination to scramble through old salvage yards in upstate New York and Pennsylvania to find just the right item.
The young fixer is also a whiz at repairing small engines, and he has a business fixing lawn mowers that helps him fund his tractor hobby.
Hanna is looking to pursue his studies in mechanical engineering in college. “I’ve had a lot of practical and hands-on experience,” he said, and hopes to see where his natural sense of curiosity and fascination with the physics takes him next at the college level.
His dad says he’s proud of his son’s hobby — even though he often has to remind Drew to go inside and do homework, not tinker with another engine part.
Timothy Hannah didn’t expect to have a small repair yard in his backcountry Greenwich home, where the family keeps chickens and raises honey bees. A garage full of parts and tractor bodies, along with the chugging sounds of laboring engines and the squawking of hens, stand out a bit in a part of the suburbs better known for manicured lawns and expensive landscaping.
But it does harken back to the old agrarian tradition in Greenwich and other parts of southern New England that still produces food for the table from the skills of the farmer and the mechanic. And the Hanna family is happy to keep that tradition alive, one engine rebuild at a time.
“My wife often asks, ‘Why do we have so much junk around here’?” Timothy Hanna said. “And I say, ‘It’s to build stuff.’ “
Drew Hanna finds the restoration work fulfilling, even though it can mean a lot of work. He finds it fun to locate a part in a huge scrap yard near Albany, N.Y., that is necessary to bring an old engine back to life.
“Going through 15 acres, tractor after tractor after tractor, it’s a challenge,” he says. “But it makes it more rewarding when you find it.”
Drew’s father said he knows all about the dark side of the Internet, and its allure for young people, so he’s happy to see his son interact with other TikTok users, many of them on the young side like Drew, to share their interests and hobbies in a positive way. “There’s a lot of good in the world, too,” he said.