The hood was propped open to show the engine, and the engine looked like it had not been kind to itself in recent years. The Toledo speculator had looked at it for three minutes and moved on. Ray Sutherland, who ran the largest equipment dealership in the county, had looked at it for five minutes, turned to his associate, said one word, “parts,” and moved on. Three other serious buyers had reached the same conclusion. The G705 was a parts machine.
Maybe worth four hundred to six hundred dollars if you broke it down and sold the components individually, but not worth running, not worth transporting if you had to move it any distance, not worth the risk of a repair bill that might exceed the machine’s value. Cal Whitmore had spent thirty-seven minutes on it. He had a flashlight, his notebook, and a compression gauge that had belonged to his grandfather.
He had checked every accessible system: engine compression, all six cylinders recorded and compared, transmission fluid pulled on the dipstick and smelled and held to the light, hydraulics tested at every accessible port, the front axle measured and noted, the fuel system traced from tank to injectors, the last two of which he had checked individually with a small mirror borrowed from his mother’s compact that he carried specifically for this purpose.
Two dealers had watched him work from a distance. One had pointed at him. The other had said something that carried far enough for Cal to hear it, not the words, just the tone, which was the tone of a man who finds something amusing that he assumes the subject cannot hear. Cal kept working.
He had been keeping a file on Minneapolis-Moline G705 tractors since the previous January, when his grandfather, a man named Harold Whitmore, who had farmed in Van Wert County for forty years and was now retired but still paying close attention, had shown him a copy of the MM technical digest that he’d saved from 1960. Harold had owned a G705 for eleven years and had seen it through two major services and one engine rebuild. He knew the machine’s weaknesses and its strengths.
He had spent two evenings in December explaining both to Cal in the kind of detail that grandfathers provide when they recognize that a grandchild is actually listening. Cal had listened. He had also gone to the Van Wert County library and requested every service bulletin he could find for the G705 through the interlibrary loan system, which took three weeks and produced seven documents. He had read all seven. He had taken notes.
He had built, over eight months, a picture of exactly what made a G705 worth buying and what made one worthless. And what he had found in thirty-seven minutes of preview work that September morning was the thing that everyone else in the auction yard had missed. The G705 in lot eleven was not a parts machine. It was a machine that looked like a parts machine.
There was a significant difference, and Cal Whitmore was the only person at that auction who knew how to tell them apart.