The story about our infection with the tractorvirus.

Let me start at the beginning, my parents live on a little farm and of course a tractor is the one thing that makes a farm a farm, besides animals I suppose.
Our tractor was in the last 20 years always a Hanomag Granit, which was bought invariably at the company Jansen in the small town Duiven. Since money was not something that my parents had in major amounts, the tractor had to work until his last bearing was worn out, before money was spend to buy some spare parts, or when really there was no other way around, another tractor was bought.
Everybody can figure out that many hours were needed to keep the Hanomag driving and working.

This is nevertheless the basis for our love with the old rusty machines and in the long run was keeping our tractor alive more and more a challenge instead of a must, especially when in the neighbourhood we were the last ones who owned a old rusty tractor and we were surrounded by new and shiny roaring monsters.

Some day, my brother Bert and I decided that it would be fun and a challenge to be occupied with one extra tractor. So we went on the look out for a victim. This became an old Ford Major who carried an Atlas crane.
First we removed the Atlas, restored and painted the complete thing, build it on a homemade trailer and sold it.

With the earned money we then restored the Ford Major. Now we regret that we didn't do this restoration more professionally, it is now only fair to say that the tractor leaks oil at every side and also the paint is not really in a good shape. However we did our first restoration job and it tasted for more.
Somehow not only my brother and I were contamined with the tractorvirus, but more and more other members of the family became tractornuts. Not everyone was infected as severely as Bert and me, but almost everyone began to like the old rust.

My father was also one of the people who is changed definitely because of the virus and he is the one who is carrying the doubtful honour that because of him we became collectors. He is the person who on vacation in Luxembourg fell over a threshing machine when he was driving around with my mother. The thresher was standing in a meadow and my father wondered what that thing was doing outside. So he informed a bit around and soon found out that the thresher was about to be burned, because the farmer needed the space and no one was using such a machine anymore. So immediate my father bought the machine and a couple of weeks later we were on the road to Luxembourg to bring the threshing machine to his new home.

Fortunately another brother of us Jan, just started his own business as a blacksmith and he was the proud owner of the van that you see at the pictures.

Since then we collected rapidly some nice tractors, first a Hela in the north of the country, then we found our Deutz and Lanz in Germany. The owner of these two tractors had given up the hope after many efforts to start the Lanz and also he thought that the Deutz was a tractor that didn't deserve to be restored, so we were able to get this two items of our collection at a very low budget prize.

In the meanwhile a next brother Aart, also began to gather some tractors, he bought a Hanomag R40, R16 and with my father he owns a R27. With me he bought a Deutz, so the barn was slowly filled with tractors.
Bert and me also bought a Kramer and together with my father we also gathered a lot of old agricultural machines. Later Aart also bought a Vierzon.

Now we have restored our Lanz, build a large trailer to transport our stuff and my fahter is working to make a old wooden wagon look brand-new.
Also Bert isn't a bachelor anymore, so now a little family takes away most of the financial resources he has, therefore we haven't bought anything anymore in the last couple of years. We are busy with the tractors we already own, now we are restoring the Hanomag Granit and we keep on dreaming of all the great things that might happen in the future, especially after visiting the Great Dorset Steamfair in 2000, a real steamtractor in our barn would also be fantastic…

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