Casting number if known.
Seed type.
Ethan returned calls after school.
Sometimes the caller knew only the planter model.
Sometimes no number remained on the broken plate.
That required more detective work.
He learned to ask questions.
How many cells?
What shape?
Diameter?
Center opening?
Drive lugs?
Thickness?
Photograph available?
A photograph meant waiting several days for mail.
Farmers mailed traced outlines.
One man placed a plate on paper, drew around it, marked dimensions, and sent the sheet folded into an envelope.
Ethan identified a likely replacement from that drawing.
It fit.
The operation remained tiny.
Almost embarrassingly tiny.
The first month’s sales totaled less than a hundred dollars.
Yet something important was happening.
The card file became more valuable than the iron.
Without the catalog, nine hundred plates were chaos.
With the catalog, they became searchable inventory.
Raymond explained it one evening.
“The scrap man saw weight.”
“You saw numbers.”
“But numbers alone still weren’t worth much.”
Ethan looked at the cards.
Raymond tapped the box.
“This is what you built.”
“Information.”
“Exactly.”
Ethan reorganized.
The first system had followed casting numbers alone.
Now he built cross-references.
Manufacturer.
Planter family.
Seed.
Casting number.
Interchange information where confirmed.
Condition.
Quantity.
He used colored index-card tabs.
Red for International.
Green for Deere.
Orange for Allis-Chalmers.
Blue for miscellaneous.
A small dot in the upper corner meant difficult to replace.
Two dots meant only one remained.
Raymond objected.
“Your system looks like a kindergarten classroom.”
“You can find things.”
Raymond stared at the bright cards.
“That’s annoyingly true.”
Ethan also learned caution.
One February afternoon, a farmer called from nearly seventy miles away asking for a plate Ethan believed he had identified correctly.
The casting number differed by only one letter.
Ethan shipped it.
The farmer called three days later.
Wrong plate.
Ethan felt humiliated.
He refunded the money and shipping.
Raymond made him explain the mistake.
“I assumed the B suffix was a revision.”
“And?”
“It meant different cell size.”
“So?”
“Never assume suffixes.”
Raymond nodded.
“Good.”
“Expensive lesson?”
“Cheaper than planting fifty acres wrong.”
Ethan never made that exact mistake again.
By early spring, the inventory had become a small fixture inside Bell Farm Repair.
Farmers stopped saying:
“You got any old plates?”
They asked:
“Do you have 197B?”
“Got a B7-24?”
“Anything for an old 290 planter?”
“Need four matching.”
That change fascinated Ethan.
Specific demand created specific value.
A common plate might sell for five dollars.
A less common one for fifteen.
A plate with no demand could sit forever.
A genuinely hard-to-find plate might bring forty.
One eventually brought sixty.
The farmer who bought it had been searching for weeks.
He had a working planter sitting idle because one plate had shattered.