
Originally Posted by
fdew
You mention a couple of farm equipment dealerships. They might be willing to organize and sponsor a tractor parade. Our little town has one every year at our town festival and it is quite popular. If you live in Ionia you ARE a redneck or you learn how to act like one.
http://www.mpnnow.com/newsnow/x14066...eekend?photo=0
Good idea. We're looking for ideas.
I previously considered a tractor parade... but I dunno... I don't think it's in the cards for here. The first problem is that there's not much of any local contingency of cool old tractors around here that would be suitable to parade down Main Street. The existing old-timer collectable tractors in this area are generally crawler type... like this:
http://home.gwi.net/~dclough/14.jpg
The shiny newer parade-able tractors are behemoths, like this:
http://www.deere.com/common/media/im...cy_324x238.jpg
And our downtown main street is only 2 blocks long.
One thing we do have locally, as far as farmer oriented eye candy goes, are 10 wheeler grain trucks... and there's gobs of those in the area... many are "pretty shiny"... like this:
http://www.farmervernstrucks.com/200...T_5D877008.jpg
I just got back from checking on one such project at a neighbor's shop. They're converting an over-the-road Peterbilt semi into one of these 10 wheeler grain trucks. There's quite a bit to doing the conversion: Remove the sleeper, install a hoist bed, install a tag axel (which involves shortening the saddle tanks)... and of-course they're doing a frame-up restore on everything else... the list goes on & on... they figure they'll have $60K just into the basic conversion (doing all the work themselves)... the fancy chrome & polished aluminum stuff they have laid out for the project is extra. They're painting the body right now... the paint job's a translucent pearl orange with black striping. It should be absolutely gorgeous when they're done... and should function ducky fine to haul grain from the field to the warehouse... full dozens of folks will probably see this masterpiece of craftsmanship in it's lifetime.