D Collector Has One From Every Year

D Collector Has One From Every Year TRACTORS Antiques 18-5-2 Canadian tractor collector Brent Campbell has a Deere tractor collection that includes at least one Model D for each of the years they were built, 1924-'53, plus what may be one of the rarest Ds ever built. All the tractors are fully restored and operational. "The D was the model produced the longest and it was very popular up here," says Campbell, Brandon, Manitoba, explaining why he started his collection. Campbell and his father, Allen, started their collection in the early '80s with his grandfather's D bought new in 1946 for $1,864. They began collecting seriously in 1988, and had completed their 30-year D collection in 1992. By then, they had acquired and restored Ds from the last three model years - 1951, '52 and '53. "The '52 and '53 D's are pretty rare tractors because there were so few produced. The company had switched to the diesel Model R by that time," Campbell notes. "There were approximately 230 `53's built and around 260 `52's" Campbell wishes he knew how many 1937 D's like the one he stumbled on a few years ago were built. But answers about that won't be available for a while. "I was baffled," says Campbell of photographs of the rare 1937 model. "I thought maybe the negatives had been turned around, or that the owner had modified it somehow" What was so intriguing about the 1937 Model D in the photographs was that its intake and exhaust pipes were on the tractor's right side. On any Model D Campbell had-ever seen before, they were on the left side. Nevertheless, the Campbells purchased the tractor in 1991. In checking the tractor's serial number, 133460, the Campbells would eventually learn they'd added one of the rarest of all Deere Ds ever made to their collection. "We didn't know how unique it was until after we got it home on the yard," he says. Deere manufactured 3,000 Model D's in 1937, but may possibly have produced as few as 13 with the right hand exhaust system. The majority of those were exported, most to South America. The exhaust system on the right side accommodates a "hot manifold." It permitted burning less refined fuels, such as No. 2 diesel or kerosene. "The hot manifold was designed to improve combustion in areas with particularly low grade or high viscosity fuels," according to a 1992 article in Two-Cylinder, an antique tractor collectors' magazine. "The hot manifold also provided improvement in some cold climate applications." Campbell won't say how'-much he and his father paid for the tractor or what they believe it's worth. (Even a ballpark figure won't be estimated until the Two-Cylinder Club, Grundy Center, Iowa, completes its research on the Deere D's with hot manifolds sometime within the next year.) However, how the Campbells acquired the tractor is almost as unique a story as the tractor itself. The Campbells were featured in an article in Country Guide, a Canadian farm paper, in the summer of 1990. They had only been collecting Deere tractors seriously for about two years. A year and a half after its publication, the Campbells received a letter, pictures of the tractor, and a phone number from a woman who'd seen the Country Guide article. Her father was the original owner of the tractor, and she wanted to know if the Campbells were interested in restoring the tractor and adding it to their collection. "We bought it over the telephone" in late fall '91, Campbell says. Restoration, which typically takes two weeks, was complete by the spring of 1992. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Brent Campbell, R.R. 5, Box 38, Campbell's Trailer Court, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada R7A 5Y5 (ph 204 7251589).

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