In a shop full of antique farm machinery, Dick Tombrink stands at the wheel of a Case steam engine he plans to bring to this year’s 27th annual threshing bee, which features Oliver tractors and machinery. (Judy Killen photo)
by Judy Killen – published in the Yellowstone County News.
WORDEN – Dick Tombrink knows antique tractors. And steam engines, balers and plows. The shops behind his home near Worden are an intricate maze of machinery stored just so. In fact, removing equipment for the annual Threshing Bee in August is a daylong process involving volunteer help, he said. Tombrink knows the lineage of the equipment in the manner that stockmen know bloodlines. He reels off vintages, serial numbers and former locations with ease, and remembers what type of work each piece of equipment needed, or still needs.
Bringing old implements to new life gets in your blood, he said. “You’re always looking for something that needs to be restored,” Tombrink said. “They’re always a challenge” and “they’re always in bad shape.” So someone who restores old farm equipment is always hunting for parts, he said. That used to be a bigger challenge, requiring travel and word of mouth connections, but the advent of the Internet has made finding parts much easier. “Its’ really handy, it’s helped a lot” to be able to Google search or try sites like eBay for parts, Tombrink said. “But still a lot of parts for the older tractors are not available,” he said.
“You’ve got to make them or cast them.” But the good thing about old tractors is that their problems usually just need a can-do attitude to fix, Tombrink said. Today’s tractors have electronic components and computerized systems, but old tractors are metal and motors. “That stuff can all be fixed one way or another,” he said.
Tombrink helped found the Antique Tractor Club (its complete name is The South Central Montana Antique Tractor And Machinery Association) in 1987, an idea that sparked when he was helping Oscar Cooke set up for one of his Oscar’s Dreamland shows. Tombrink, Dave and Leo Lambrecht and Duane Shieffer decided that with their own antique machinery and enough other interested in joining up, a tractor club could take off.
Today, the club has about 200 members. New members are welcome at club meetings on the third Thursday of every month at the Yellowstone Valley Electric Coop south of Huntley on Pryor Creek Road.
The club’s big event is the annual Threshing Bee, held this year on Aug. 15-16. This year’s event, the 27th annual threshing bee, celebrates an earlier time when steam power did the work. “We do what we can to keep that going,” Tombrink said. Held on the grounds of the Huntley Project Museum of Irrigated Agriculture, the bee includes a parade, games for children, music from a steam calliope, a working blacksmith shop, a sawmill and the threshing. “We raise grain down there, bind it with a binder and then we shock it,” Tombrink said. “We thresh it with an old-time thresher” and once it’s ground into flour, “some women bake the bread in Dutch ovens over a fire,” he said.
