While Chad was making his way home from the Bonneville Salt Flats, home to the world’s fastest and most powerful cars, I was heading due south with my family to Kinzer, PA home of one of the great vintage tractor and equipment shows in America. The 2011 Rough and Tumble Thresherman’s Reunion went down last weekend and I was there, along with BangShift member Gene Stauffer to check out a truly amazing collection of historic working iron. The Rough and Tumble Thresherman’s reunion has been going for 48 years straight and stands as a celebration of the vehicle that have helped to feed and build this country.
Click here to jump to the gallery
Other than the sheer volume of stuff that I knew I would see, I was also excited to get to this event because of the steam tractors that gather in Kinzer. There are few places in the world to see more of them in one location. We weren’t 10 minutes into the gate when a massive old Frick with iron wheels that must have stood eight feet tall chuffed by us like no big thing.
Outside of the tractors there were a great variety of vintage cars and trucks on hand in various places, and the capper was the large equipment area where steam shovels, ancient dozers, drag lines, an old well drilling right, and even an Eisenhower-era bottom dump truck milled around making noise and moving dirt.
The centerpiece of the event is a demonstration on the historical progression of wheat threshing. Beginning with hand flails and working through each technological advancement, from hand cranked threshing mills to horse treadmill powered units, ultimately moving toward steam tractors and finally a modern diesel unitl running a belt driven threshing machine that takes the wheat in one end and spits out baled hay on the other, with the actual grains of wheat emptying in another location.
I have to say that anyone with a remote interest in this stuff or even just a gearhead that is mechanically curious, you NEED to find a way to this event. Hell, there is a whole building full of stationary engines running, chuffing, and popping away, their massive flywheels spinning freely. A 60hp job that is about the size of a schoolbus had it’s exhaust pipe outside of the building and was spinning so slowly you could here the combustion and then look to the pipe for the puff of smoke before it actually got there!
Outside of the big stuff there are hundreds of old hit and miss engines, small tractors, trucks, etc spread about the grounds. We were only able to spend one day (and a shorter one than we wanted at that) but this could easily be a two day event with room to spare. Did we mention that they have a steam locomotive running around that people can ride on too?
Hit the link below to take a virtual tour of the show!
Love it, Brian! Did they have a tractor pull?
Beautiful shots. On the old timey wrenches, they used to use the thread size, not the hex size marked on the wrench. What we use today as a 3/4 wrench, they called a 1/2 inch.
The tractor pull is a highlight of the week. This year the pull got rained out and they were playing catch up on Saturday. The track was busy all day, starting with garden tractors. Some of those guys are on alchohol and have quite a bit of cash dumped into them little suckers! I wish they would have a steam pull, but I don’t think the association has a large enough sled to handle a steamer. They should rent one!!!