Dressed-Up Deere B Sports A Home-Built Cab

Dressed-Up Deere B Sports A Home-Built Cab TRACTORS Antiques 19-2-17 "I started out planning to build just a heat housing for my 1952 Deere B tractor, but I ended up with a complete cab," says Paul Potter, Columbus, hid., who recently sent FARM SHOW a photo of the "dressed up" tractor. The outside walls of the cab are made from steel and the inside walls are hardened masonite, with a half inch of styrofoam insulation between the walls. An aluminum visor shades the wind-shield, which originally served as the rear window on a 1966 Buick Riviera. The two tinted plexiglass windows on each side of the windshield are from an old trailer house and open toward the front. The two side windows behind them don't open. The rear of the cab is open. Chrome strips salvaged from a 1963 Oldsmobile and 1964 Chevrolet were used as trim. "I built it entirely from scrap materials except for a 4 by 8-ft. sheet of tinted plexiglass," says Potter, who built the cab two years ago. "People get a kick out of it whenever I take it to antique shows. It stays pretty warm inside the cab. I made panels from hardened rubber that slip in alongside the engine to trap heat and divert it back to the cab. In the summer I open the windows and use an electric fan to blow air toward me. The cab has a fiberglass dash salvaged from the Riviera. The seat is an old office chair and there's an AM-FM radio. "It's pretty noisy inside the cab because it's mounted so close to the 2-cylinder engine. I added padding and rubber mounts for the windows to suppress the noise but it didn't help much. "I had trouble starting the tractor be-cause it had only one 6-volt battery. I didn't want to ruin it by converting it to 12 volt so I hooked up two 6-volt batteries in parallel and connected them to the original 6-volt battery and starter. It starts right up now. The tractor's headlights and tail lights operate off the two add-on batteries. The front and rear flasher lights are on a separate switch. The headlights are off an old car and are mounted on front of the cab. " Ritter put 12-in. dia. chrome hubcaps on the rear tires and added chrome strips (salvaged from a 1937 Ford car) on the front wheels. The tractor also has a chrome air intake and a chrome exhaust muffler. Potter built a 3-pt. "fence cart" for the tractor that's equipped with three spools two on the side and one on top. The two side spools are used to unroll electric and barbed wire, while the top spool is used to reel in electric wire. The top spool is a "check roller" designed for old-style planters. It's pto-driven off a gear reduction box salvaged from an old roto-tiller. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Paul Potter, 4255-S-225-W, Columbus, Ind. 47201 (ph 812 342-4977).

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