A restoration with a purpose: Central junior honors late great uncle
Central junior Keaton Klingman is restoring a 1953 John Deere 40 in honor of his late great uncle, Lyle Klingman, who he considered a “second grandpa.” He began the project in December and hopes to have it completed by August, in time for the county and state fairs.
While it took Keaton Klingman just six days to tear the tractor apart, putting it back together again has been a bit more challenging. One reason is due to the amount of work necessary to fix the tractor and everything that’s wrong with it, an extensive list including a cracked engine block, replacing bearings, the lower end of the engine, transmission and cracked final drive housings, among other things.
Keaton Klingman has learned a lot working alongside his dad and friends over the years, but this was his first solo project. He’s “never worked this deeply with a tractor before.”
By Willis Patenaude, Times-Register
Even though 17-year-old Central junior Keaton Klingman has spent a lifetime in the family shop working alongside his dad, rebuilding and restoring things such as engines and tractors, and while assisting friends throughout high school has helped spur the hobby, there’s something different about his latest project: restoring a 1953 John Deere 40.
It’s not for a school project or even a club. No, this restoration is personal and emotional. It is touched with sentimental value, because even a lifetime in the shop doesn’t prepare you for losing someone. That’s what happened to Keaton in 2020, when his great uncle, Lyle Klingman, suddenly passed away from colon cancer.
“He was told it was treatable, but only survived about a week after diagnosis. He was like a second grandpa to me,” Keaton said.
In that moment, the John Deere that belonged to his “second grandpa” suddenly became his. And what started out as a regular tractor restoration project became something more.
It became a personal journey—an important new challenge laced with family significance. After all, it’s the tractor Keaton’s “second grandpa” used to take rides on and drive around in the garden.
Of course, prior to starting this tractor project, Keaton had experience and learned a lot working alongside dad and his friends, but this was his first on his own. He’s “never worked this deeply with a tractor before.”
Some of that has to do with the restoration itself, which is still an ongoing process. It started Dec. 9, 2022, when Keaton pulled the tractor into the shop. While it took him just six days to tear it all apart, putting it back together again has been a bit more challenging.
One reason is due to the amount of work necessary to fix the tractor and everything that’s wrong with it, an extensive list including a cracked engine block, replacing bearings, the lower end of the engine, transmission and cracked final drive housings, among other things.
The other challenge is acquiring parts, which sometimes requires getting creative. One such creative instance involved the cracked engine block, which typically requires finding a replacement, but there wasn’t one to be found. Instead, Keaton and a list of helpers, including his dad Mace, brother Parker and grandpa Gary, turned the venture into a “family affair.”
“It was cracked around the water jacket, so we were able to find a special lock and stitch system to fix it,” Keaton explained. “We actually found this solution on accident because my brother was working on a project at the museum and needed a similar part, and he thought it would work for me too. It was pretty cool. It made my week when that worked.”
Other than being creative, Keaton acquires parts the old-fashioned ways, by paying for them. He replaced 25 to 30 bearings ranging in price from $5 to $50. Sometimes, he has to look outside Iowa, which the family had to do to replace the cracked final drive housing. The part to replace that came all the way from Pennsylvania.
“When we do need parts, we take them wherever we can find them, [but] we’ve had the equipment to fix most of it ourselves,” Keaton said. “We recently got a lathe and a mill, so we’ve been able to manufacture some of our own pieces as needed…but at the moment, I’m waiting on some extra parts. The focus so far has been on the engine and the drive train.”
Once the tractor is finished, Keaton plans to take it to the county and state fairs for FFA, which gives him a deadline of mid-August. No concerns were expressed about missing that deadline.
After the fairs and potential competitions, while some people would store their restorations, show them or simply keep them in idle in a collection, Keaton intends to “use the daylights out of that thing!”
“I’m going to use it to for hay, to mow pastures, rake hay, go for tractor rides, do some fill-in work for what might get missed with a big planter. With the plan on using it, the biggest area that might suffer would be the paint. The mechanics will be fine; just have normal wear and tear. It’ll be used for what it was meant to be used for,” Keaton explained.
That’s the sentiments of someone born into farming, who works on the family farm of over 280 acres of row crop ground that is tilled, planted and harvested each year with corn and soybeans. The farm also has roughly 40 acres of hay for beef cattle.
It’s why Keaton is in the Central FFA, participates in crop scouting during summer through 4H and wants to go to college for agronomy.
“I plan on farming for most of my life,” Keaton said.
He would also like to continue restoring tractors, mainly older ones, or tractors old enough that they don’t have a computer.
A dream tractor he’d like to pull into the shop if the chance ever arises is a 1466 International. However, they are “incredibly expensive,” Keaton said.
“Honestly, to me, as long as they’re old and kind of cool, I’m happy. I would work with just about any of them. They all have their good sides and bad sides. I’m just happy to be working on them,” he shared.
Keaton’s current project is even more special, though, because it’s motivated by sentimentality and inspired by a lost loved one.
“My own restoration has been the most rewarding because I can work on it whenever I want, and it has sentimental value. Working on this project just makes me happy, and there’s also a special kind of pride that comes with being able to restore it,” Keaton said.
