They laughed when I paid $35 for a tractor with no engine, and the dealer who mocked me watched me pull four plow bottoms through Wisconsin sand. Years later, while farms around us collapsed under debt, I bought my neighbor’s land with cash. But the machine that changed everything began as an empty red shell nobody else wanted….

Part 2/5: A winter of careful measurements turned Army surplus into a diesel tractor

The first major piece I had to build was an adapter plate. The Continental engine’s bell housing didn’t match the Farmall transmission, so I needed a plate that would connect the two while keeping the engine centered on the transmission input shaft.

I started with a one-inch-thick piece of steel. I measured both housings, marked every bolt position, then checked the measurements again. The plate had to be centered within a thousandth of an inch. If it was off, the drivetrain would vibrate. That vibration could ruin the bearings, damage the clutch, and shake loose the work I’d spent months putting together.

I spent three weeks on that part.

I bored the holes on my father’s milling machine and machined a pilot bore to align the engine with the transmission. When the plate finally fit, I didn’t celebrate. I checked it again.

Next came the flywheel adapter. The Continental crankshaft flange was smaller than the Farmall flywheel bore. I machined a stepped collar that bolted to the crankshaft and gave the Farmall flywheel the diameter and bolt pattern it needed. Then I balanced the assembly on a fixture I built from an old wheel balancer, checking it with a dial indicator until I was satisfied.

I fabricated new engine mounts from half-inch steel plate, welding mounting pads to the Farmall’s frame rails. The brackets had to position the Continental where the original engine had sat, and they needed rubber isolation so the diesel’s vibration wouldn’t travel straight into the frame.

Then I worked through the systems one by one. The Continental’s air cleaner sat higher than the original hood allowed, so I modified the hood. I built a new fuel system with a diesel tank, lift pump, filters, and injector lines. I fitted a larger radiator from a scrapped truck because the diesel needed more cooling capacity. I rewired the tractor, added glow plugs, and installed a heavy-duty starter.

Every change created another problem. A new radiator meant new hose connections. A different fuel pump needed a different mount. The starter had to engage properly with the flywheel. I couldn’t buy a ready-made kit because there was no kit. If I needed a part, I made it or adapted something I already had.

After chores, I went to the workshop. On weekends, I stayed there as long as the farm allowed. Sometimes I’d look up and realize the light had changed outside. The whole time, I could hear my father’s voice in my head.

“Measure twice. Think three times. Cut once.”

The work took five months. There were stretches when a part refused to fit, or the next step wasn’t clear. I’d stop, put down my tools, and study the engine and frame until I could see what needed to change. I learned to be patient with the machine. Metal didn’t care how badly I wanted a solution.

By March 1968, I had the pieces where they belonged. I rolled the Farmall out of the workshop for the first time and stood beside it in the yard. The old frame looked almost the same. The engine under the hood was entirely different.

I turned the key.

The Continental fired on the second crank. It settled into an idle lower and smoother than the Farmall’s original gasoline engine. The sound was wrong for a factory Super M. Too deep. Too heavy. It sounded like somebody had put the engine of a small military truck inside a farm tractor.

I sat there listening to it for a few seconds, then drove to the south field.

The original Super M could pull a three-bottom plow through our sandy ground without struggling. I hooked up a four-bottom plow, lowered it into the soil, and opened the throttle. The Continental pulled all four bottoms through the field.

It didn’t strain. It didn’t stall. The engine kept working, steady and sure, as the plow turned over the sand behind me.

The tractor had more torque than the original, used cheaper fuel, and had cost me a fraction of what a new machine would have. In the field, I stopped thinking about the hours I’d spent making parts. I watched the plow and listened to the engine. The machine worked.

The neighbors heard it before they saw it. Sound carries a long way over open fields, and the diesel rumble didn’t resemble any Farmall they knew. Men who had laughed when I hauled the empty tractor home were now standing beside their fences, watching me pull four bottoms through soil that ought to have been a hard job for three.

Gordon heard the story at the co-op. Five different farmers told him the same thing: Calvin Rusk had put a military diesel into a Farmall, and it pulled like a much bigger tractor.

The next Saturday, Gordon drove out to my farm.

I was changing the oil. The Continental used a different filter from the original Farmall engine, so I’d machined an adapter for that as well. I had the hood up and a wrench in my hand when Gordon walked around the tractor.

He didn’t start with a joke. He just looked.

“That’s a Continental CD193 from Fort McCoy?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“How’d you make the transmission work? The bolt patterns are completely different.”

“Adapter plate. I machined it on my father’s mill.”

Gordon crouched and looked underneath. He studied the adapter plate, the engine mounts, the cooling system, and the fuel lines. For fifteen minutes, he examined the work without saying much. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking for a mistake or trying to understand how I had done it.

Finally he stood up. His expression had changed.

“This is factory-quality work,” he said. “Maybe better than factory.”

“My father taught me.”

“Your father was a machinist?”

“The best one in Adams County.”

Gordon looked again at the engine. “How much power is it making?”

“About fifty-eight horsepower at the drawbar, I figure. The Army rated it at forty-eight, but my father always said it could do more. He was right.”

The original Super M had made forty-four horsepower. The Continental ran on diesel that cost twenty-two cents a gallon, while gasoline was thirty-five cents.

“And what did you spend on it?” Gordon asked.

“Thirty-five for the tractor. Eighty-five for the engine. Maybe forty in steel, gaskets, hoses, and hardware. Call it a hundred and sixty dollars.”

Gordon was a John Deere dealer. The cheapest machine on his lot cost $7,400. He was standing beside a tractor that pulled four plow bottoms and had cost me $160 to build.

“I’m not going to sell you a John Deere,” he said.

“Am I supposed to ask you to?”

“Probably not.”

“No. Probably not.”

He looked at the Farmall once more, then drove away.

I didn’t know what he was thinking. I only knew he didn’t laugh. For the first time since the auction, he had nothing to say.

### Part 3/5: The tractor became a business, and the dealer began sending customers

The diesel Super M was only the beginning. I farmed my 140 acres with it starting in 1968. The engine never missed a day.

In January, it started at twenty below zero when some gasoline engines wouldn’t turn over. It burned about a third less fuel than the tractors around it. It pulled harder, ran cooler in summer, and needed little beyond oil changes and filter replacements. By 1975, it had logged more than 4,000 hours without a major repair.

I kept working in my father’s shop, and other farmers began asking about the conversion. They didn’t want a new tractor with a large payment attached. They wanted something that could handle their fields and keep running through the season.

Over the next decade, I built three more diesel conversions. The first was a Farmall H with a small Perkins diesel for a neighbor who farmed sixty acres. The second was a Farmall 560 with a turbocharged Continental for a farmer who needed more power but couldn’t afford a new machine. The third was a Farmall 460 with a surplus Navy generator diesel for a dairy farmer who wanted something he could count on during Wisconsin winters.

Each conversion was different. Each adapter plate had to be made for the specific engine and tractor. I couldn’t pull a set of instructions off a shelf and follow them. I had to measure, plan, machine, and test.

The farmers brought me their tractor frames. I found engines at military surplus sales, industrial auctions, and scrapyards. I charged between $200 and $400 for each conversion, mostly to cover the parts and a modest amount for my time. Everyone understood that this was custom work. If a part didn’t fit, I made another one. If the engine needed an adjustment, I worked it out.

Gordon Pike noticed that my work was drawing people who might otherwise have come to his dealership. I expected him to be angry. Instead, he made a decision that surprised me.

In 1976, he started sending farmers my way.

When somebody came into the dealership looking for a used tractor on a tight budget, Gordon would be honest about what he could offer. If the man couldn’t afford a machine from the lot, Gordon told him about a farmer south of Friendship who built tractors from surplus parts.

“I can’t help you for under $3,000,” Gordon would tell them. “But there’s a man who can. His name’s Calvin Rusk. He’ll build you a tractor from surplus parts for a fraction of what I’d charge, and it’ll run better than most of what’s on my lot.”

It was an unusual arrangement. A dealer was sending customers to someone whose work competed with the machines he sold. But Gordon understood the people who came through his doors. Some of them couldn’t take on a loan. They needed a tractor they could pay for without putting the farm at risk.

He also understood that a farmer remembered who helped him. If a customer bought a converted tractor from me and later grew enough to afford a new machine, he might come back to Gordon.

I didn’t make a fortune from the conversions. I made enough to buy materials and add something to my savings. The farm was steady work, but those 140 acres were sandy ground. The corn yields were modest, usually eighty to ninety bushels an acre. I wasn’t getting rich. I was careful.

My land was paid for. My workshop was paid for. My tractor had no payments. I kept my costs low and saved what I could.

During the 1970s, I put away between $6,000 and $8,000 a year. By 1982, I had $78,000 in savings. The diesel conversions had brought in another $15,000 to $20,000 over the years.

I wasn’t trying to prove anything to Gordon or the people who had laughed at the auction. I had a farm to run and a family to support. I knew what my work could do, and I didn’t need everyone to agree.

Then the farm crisis reached Adams County.

Interest rates climbed above eighteen percent. Corn prices fell below two dollars a bushel. Land values were cut in half. Farmers who had borrowed heavily during the boom were suddenly trying to pay loans with crops that earned less each year. People who had bought new equipment on credit were watching their payments arrive whether or not the harvest had been good.

Between 1982 and 1986, Adams County lost six farms.

The people who had expanded when prices were high were now in trouble. Some had to sell land. Some sold equipment. Some went to the bank and asked for more time. Gordon saw the crisis from the dealership. The farmers who came in no longer wanted the latest model. They wanted to know what they could afford to keep.

My costs didn’t change much. They had never changed much. The Continental burned inexpensive diesel and asked for oil. The land owed nothing. The shop owed nothing.

When corn fell to $1.75 a bushel, I tightened my belt and kept farming.

In the fall of 1984, the Creger place went up for auction. It was 180 acres adjoining my east fence. The land was sandy, like mine. The yields would be modest, but the opportunity was plain: 180 acres beside my farm, offered at a price that reflected how difficult the times had become.

The bank opened the bidding at $200 an acre.

I bid $240.

A speculator from Milwaukee raised the bid to $280.

I went to $310.

The speculator dropped out.

At $310 an acre, the 180 acres cost $55,800. I paid cash with one check. No financing. No loan. No payments to worry over after the sale.

The auctioneer confirmed the payment method, and the crowd went quiet.

That kind of quiet has a sound of its own. A moment earlier, people had been talking and shifting their feet. Then everyone seemed to understand at the same time that the farmer with the surplus engine and the patched-together equipment was the one able to write the check, while other farmers were trying to keep their land.

Gordon was at the auction, watching. He walked over after my name was announced as the buyer.

“Fifty-five thousand dollars in cash from the man who builds tractors out of Army surplus and scrap frames,” he said.

“That’s right.”

Gordon took off his cap and rubbed his forehead. “I’ve been selling John Deeres for twenty years. Selling horsepower and the future. And the man who showed up with an engineless Farmall and thirty-five dollars is the one buying land while my customers are selling it.”

“Your customers bought on credit,” I said. “I built from scrap. There’s a difference.”

“The difference is about $55,000 and zero payments.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

Gordon looked at me for a moment, then held out his hand. “I owe you an apology. I laughed at that Farmall in 1967. Called it a tin can. Told everybody you were crazy.”

“You sent me customers in ’76.”

“I remember. It was the least I could do. You were building better machines than I was selling. Took me a while to admit it, but I knew it by ’75.”

We shook hands in the auction yard. The dealer and the builder. The man who sold new machines and the man who made an old frame work in a way nobody had planned.

### Part 4/5: Paying cash for the Creger land changed how the county saw me

I didn’t buy the Creger place because I wanted to make a point. The land bordered mine, and it was for sale at a price I could afford. I knew what sandy soil could produce, and I knew what it could earn if a farmer kept his expenses under control.

Still, I understood what people saw at the auction. For years, I’d been the man who bought the tractor nobody else wanted. I drove equipment that looked old beside the new machines in Gordon’s lot. I built what I needed in a shop where my father had spent his life working. Then, while others were struggling to keep their farms, I paid cash for 180 acres.

People began to look at my machinery differently. Before, they saw odd choices. Now they saw a farmer who had kept his bills low and his options open.

The years after the auction weren’t easy just because I owned more land. Farming stayed unpredictable. Prices moved. The weather changed. The work never stopped. The difference was that I wasn’t carrying a large debt into every season.

The diesel Super M kept working. I used it through planting and fieldwork, through wet seasons and dry ones. The Continental engine still started and pulled the way it had when I first put it into the Farmall. There were repairs, of course. Machines always need attention. But there was no major rebuild.

The tractor had cost $160 to put together. It had worked for years without taking a loan payment from me each month. That mattered more than looking new.

I continued the conversion work when farmers asked. I never tried to turn the workshop into a factory. I didn’t have employees or a production line. Each project came in on its own terms. A farmer would bring me a tractor frame and tell me what he needed it to do. I’d look at the frame, find an engine that made sense, and figure out how to make the two work together.

Some jobs took longer than expected. Sometimes I’d make a part twice because I wasn’t satisfied with the first attempt. That was part of the work. The point wasn’t to produce something quickly. The point was to build a machine that would do the job and hold up.

Gordon kept running his dealership. He was not my enemy, and I wasn’t trying to take his business. He sold new machines to farmers who could afford them and wanted them. I built tractors for farmers who needed a different answer.

That arrangement worked better than either of us expected. Gordon could send someone my way when a new tractor would put too much pressure on the man’s finances. Later, when a farmer was in a position to buy new equipment, Gordon might get the sale. He had stopped treating my work as a joke. He understood its value.

The farm itself grew from 140 acres to 320. I kept the land in production and tried to make sensible choices. I did not suddenly become a different person because I had bought the neighboring farm. I still went to the workshop. I still kept an eye on fuel costs. I still repaired what could be repaired before buying something new.

My daughter, Mara, grew up around the same sounds I had known as a boy: the lathe turning, a hammer striking metal, the steady buzz of a grinder. She learned how to work in the shop as I had learned from my father. I showed her how to measure a part, how to read a machine, and how to stop before making a cut she couldn’t take back.

I didn’t force her to follow me. She watched, asked questions, and eventually learned to do the work herself. The workshop was open to her, the same way it had been open to me. If she wanted to learn the lathe, I showed her the lathe. If she wanted to understand the mill, I showed her how to set it up.

By the time I was ready to step away from running the farm, Mara understood both the land and the machinery. She knew the work didn’t end when the day’s chores were done. She also understood why I had kept the old equipment running rather than replacing it simply because a newer model was available.

In 1994, when I was fifty-six, I handed the farm operation to her. The combined 320 acres became hers to manage. She had grown up in the workshop and knew the farm as well as I did. She used a mix of modern equipment and converted machines, choosing what made sense for each job.

The diesel Super M was still running. The Continental CD193 had logged thousands of hours on the adapter plate I made in my father’s workshop. The Army had called the engine serviceable and removed it from a generator set. The auctioneer had nearly skipped the tractor frame. I had put them together because I thought both still had useful work left in them.

By then, the tractor had become familiar across the county. Farmers knew its sound. Some remembered the jokes when it first appeared. Others had only heard that an old Farmall had been turned into a diesel and was still working.

I didn’t ask people to admire it. I didn’t need the tractor to be famous. It was useful. It did the work. That was enough.

The story could have ended there, with the farm passed to Mara and the tractor still running. But in 1998, the Adams County Historical Society asked me to display the diesel Super M at the county fair.

I agreed on one condition: the display had to include a sign explaining how much it cost.

They put the tractor on display and set the sign beside it. It listed the Farmall frame at $35. The Continental CD193 diesel from military surplus at $85. The adapter plate, mounts, hardware, and other materials at $40.

At the bottom, the total read: $160.

The sign also listed the tractor’s performance: fifty-eight horsepower, capacity to pull a four-bottom plow, and more than 18,000 hours logged. It was still in daily farm use.

Below that, in smaller letters, was the credit I wanted people to see:

Built by Calvin Rusk in his father’s workshop, winter 1967–68.

Matthias Rusk, master machinist, 1903–1965.

I stood by the display for most of the day. Farmers walked up, read the numbers, looked at the tractor, and said little. There wasn’t much to add. The numbers told the story in a way that didn’t need embellishment.

### Part 5/5: At the fair, the old dealer finally understood what my father meant

Gordon Pike came by in the afternoon. He had retired by then and was seventy-two, walking with a cane. He stood in front of the sign for a long time, reading every line.

“$160,” he said at last.

“That’s what the parts cost.”

“I sold 402s for $7,400. 443s for $28,000. 464s for $45,000.” He looked from the sign to the tractor. “And this thing, this $160 pile of surplus and scrap, outlasted and outworked every one of them.”

“Not outperformed,” I said. “Your John Deeres were fine machines. I just didn’t need them.”

“Nobody needed them,” Gordon said.

He looked at the tractor again. The Farmall’s paint was worn. The frame had the marks of years of work. The diesel under the hood still sounded different from a factory Super M. It had never been a polished showpiece. It had been built to pull.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about since I retired,” Gordon said. “Nobody needed the horsepower I was selling. They needed what you built. Enough machine to do the job, paid for in cash, running on cheap fuel, built to last.”

He gestured toward the fairgrounds.

“Everything else was decoration.”

I smiled. It was the same smile my father wore when a part came off the lathe exactly right. Not pride in being better than somebody else. Just the quiet satisfaction of seeing a job done the way it needed to be done.

“My father used to say a factory builds what it can sell,” I told him. “A machinist builds what he needs.”

“Your father was right.”

“He usually was.”

We stood beside the tractor for a while. Around us, families moved between the exhibits. People stopped, read the sign, and looked under the hood. Some asked about the engine. I explained where I found it and how I made the adapter plate. I told them about the measurements, the mounts, the radiator, and the months I spent working in my father’s shop.

I didn’t tell the story to prove that new machinery was worthless. It wasn’t. Gordon sold good tractors. A well-built machine could be the right choice for a farmer who needed it and could afford it. The Farmall’s story was about a different choice: seeing what was already available and making it serve a purpose.

My father had taught me that the factory’s design was not the only way to think about a machine. He hadn’t taught me to reject every new idea. He’d taught me to understand the problem first.

The empty Farmall frame had been a problem without an engine. The surplus Continental had been an engine without a tractor. Together, with enough work and careful measurement, they became a machine that could pull harder than the Farmall had from the factory.

The county had seen an empty hood. Gordon had seen a joke. The auctioneer had seen scrap iron worth twenty dollars. I had seen a frame with a good transmission, an engine worth using, and a workshop full of tools.

That difference mattered. It didn’t mean I could turn every discarded machine into a useful one. It meant I could look at the parts in front of me and ask whether they still had a job to do.

The tractor had cost $160 to build. It had helped me farm 140 acres, then 320. I had saved money by keeping equipment paid for and making repairs myself. When the Creger place came up for auction, I was able to buy land with cash. The engine kept running, hour after hour, for more than 18,000 hours without a major rebuild.

There was no trick to it. No hidden fortune. No secret deal. My father had given me years of knowledge. I had learned to use his tools. I had worked long evenings after chores. And I had built what I needed.

Mara still farms the land today, using a mix of modern and converted equipment. The workshop still stands. Her son is sixteen and learning to run the lathe. Three generations of the family have spent time in that shop, learning how to measure, cut, fit, and repair.

The diesel Super M still runs, too. It remains a working tractor, not an exhibit that never leaves the fairground. The engine the Army removed from an obsolete generator still has a job. The frame the auctioneer nearly passed over still carries a plow through Wisconsin soil.

When I look at the tractor, I don’t see a miracle. I see a good frame and a good engine joined by careful work. I see my father’s workshop and the lessons he left me. I see the long winter nights when the fit was wrong and I had to start again.

Other people saw an empty machine. I saw something unfinished.

That was all.

THE END