Long, Dull Winters Help Enrich His Tractor Trove

When you’re a dairy and swine farmer in mid-state Ohio, you deal with two things a lot--tractors and long winters with not much to do.

So Don Dahlinghaus, 67, combines these two facts of life, spending his downtime expanding and tinkering with his collection of 50 antique tractors, which for the last eight months he’s displayed on his Web site at https://www.dondatractors.homestead.com.

“I have too many other things to do in the summertime,” said Dahlinghaus, who retired from full-time farming two years ago but still helps his sons, Mark and Paul, on their 410-acre spread near Dayton, Ohio. “This is more or less a winter hobby.”

He started collecting 25 years ago with a 1936 Farmall F-122, for which he paid about $200--demonstrating that collecting antique tractors can be more affordable than collecting antique cars.

“I spotted a tractor in the neighborhood, and it looked exactly like the one I grew up with,” Dahlinghaus said. “It was very similar, and I purchased it and fixed it up.

“About a year went by, and I saw another one advertised in the paper. It was a John Deere, a 1937, that we had a little later,” he said. “I thought it would be sort of nice to have one of those too.

“As time went on, I got a few more, and every winter I restored one or two, and it just sort of built from there,” said Dahlinghaus, who painstakingly cleans and removes the rust from his discoveries and mixes his own paint to match the original colors.

Farming and tractors Dahlinghaus knew all about, but he had little experience with computers until a friend got him interested and suggested he display his collection for all the world to see.

Since then Dahlinghaus has received calls and e-mails from collectors and curious people around the country. He spends about two hours a week answering queries or adding photos or text. Last year he even sold one of his tractors to a man in West Virginia who spotted it on the Web site.

“It’s real interesting,” Dahlinghaus said of the Internet. “I just spend hours and hours looking on that thing. It’s a great thing. The only thing is it’s time-consuming. A lot of times on Sunday mornings I’ll get on that thing and spend a couple of hours.”

His current restoration project is a 1929 Model L Case that he bought a year ago. “I brought it home, put new fluids in it and took it for a drive in the field to see how it would run. It ran like a gem,” he writes on his site, which features pictures of many other jewels--green John Deeres or red Farmalls, with him beside them or his grandchildren riding them in a parade.

His site also features before and after photos, including those of a 1949 John Deere Model M, which he shows muddy and rusted on a trailer when he got it, and gleaming green and yellow after his restoration.

Another one, a 1944 John Deere Model H, he had to assemble almost like a kit. As he writes on the site, “a young fellow had started restoring the tractor and lost interest. It runs real nice and turned out pretty good considering it was in pieces in boxes.”

He learned most of what he needed to know about repairing and restoring tractors while working at an International tractor dealer after high school and again after spending 1953-1955 in the Army, where he worked as a tank mechanic.

“It sure came in handy as far as my farming goes,” he said. “I don’t want to brag, but we’ve never had a tractor in the shop.”

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Steve Carney is a freelance journalist.