The Farmall My Grandpa Pulled at 86

But water had gotten in somewhere along the way, probably through the manifold, and the engine was frozen up solid. I put a bar on the flywheel and it didn’t move a quarter inch.

“We’ll soak it,” Grandpa said.

So we filled the cylinders with a mix of diesel and automatic transmission fluid, half and half, and put a rag over each one, and left it.

Mallory spread a blanket on the concrete end and put the baby down on it. Grandpa sat on an upside-down bucket and watched her roll over for a good ten minutes without saying a word.

At noon he bowed his head over his ham sandwich and said the same grace he has said my whole life, the short one, and then said, “And bless the old H,” which he had never added before.

Mallory looked at me over the top of the cooler. I looked back. Neither of us said anything.

We came back the next Saturday and the one after that. Every time, I’d put the bar on the flywheel and lean. Every time, nothing.

The third Saturday, we topped off the cylinders again and Grandpa said, “Give it the weekend.”

The fourth Saturday it moved. Just a hair, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I felt it go, and I said so, and Grandpa came up off his bucket faster than I’d seen him move in two years.

“Again,” he said.

Three of the pistons came free that day. Number three would not. We had soaked that engine for nine days of actual soaking spread over a month, and number three was still stuck.

So I cut a block of oak off an old fence post, set it on the top of the piston, and went at it with a four-pound hammer. Gentle at first, then less gentle.

Grandpa stood next to me with his arms crossed.

“Don’t break it,” he said.

“I’m not going to break it.”

“Your dad broke one on a Super M in 1977.”

“I’m not Dad,” I said, and hit it again, and the piston dropped about a quarter inch with a sound like a rifle shot. Grandpa laughed. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since April.

The Farmall H has wet sleeves. That means the cylinder walls are separate pieces that slide out of the block, so you can rebuild one of these engines on a dirt floor with hand tools, which was a big part of the point of it in 1948.

We pulled all four sleeves with a puller I borrowed from work. Two of them were pitted bad. We ordered a full sleeve and piston kit, with rings and pins and gaskets, and new rod and main bearings while we were at it.

The kit came to six hundred and forty dollars with shipping. I tried to put it on my card. Grandpa walked into the house and came back out with a coffee can.

He counted it out on the hood of my truck, mostly twenties, some of them older than me. When he was done there was a little left in the bottom.