Lost Ghosts

[MADSCIENTIST]

I am slowly refinishing my Cub, paint, new decals, thorough cleaning, inspections, adjustments, etc. It is not a full restoriation by any means, but I am trying to pretty it up. A friend of mine came over to give me a hand this weekend. He was there to help me lift things, clean parts, chase bolt holes, provide moral support, and drink my beer. I had to run to the store to pick up some things, and he was planning on leaving, but he said he was going to finish up prepping a couple parts for paint before he left. When I returned I found that he had taken my 4 1/2" grinder, put on a flap disc and ground all of the weld spatter and smoothed out all of the welds on the parts he was working on. The welds were very smooth and polished when he was done. The unfortunate thing is that I was deliberately not grinding any welds smooth and for kind of a weird reason. These old tractors were welded by hand, in the early days of electric arc welding. To me, every weld is a signature of the guy that made it, some better than others, but all unique. Today these things would be MIG welded by robots, every weld as smooth and perfect as the next. Whenever I look at the tractor, at the way the steel wrinkled ever so slightly across the hood when it was formed, at imperfect welds, at marks in the castings, I am reminded of the people and the processes that made them. They are traces, "ghosts" of a by-gone era. This weekend some of my tractor's "ghost markings" were wiped away, I think I'm going to miss them.

[Cecil]

I feel the same way. As I was cleaning up the single point hitch I found that some of the welds still had the slag on them.