Luray farmer breathes new life into family relics
Every tractor has a story. Mike Schantz has heard his fair share of those tractor’s stories over the past four decades. The stories are less about the nuts and bolts of the tractor and more about the who and why. Mike recalls when he was contacted about fixing up an old family tractor that had been building up dust and wear for years.
“The family was surprising one of the brothers on Memorial Day weekend, which was a year away,” Mike says. “I worked on it for a year and come the holiday, I just drove right up and delivered it to him with his family there. He had no idea it was even gone. It was really emotional. Seeing that hits home why these tractors are so important to families and their legacies.”
For 39 years, Mike has fixed, degreased, painted and breathed new life into tractors that have seen better days. From his Luray farm, Mike and his team have restored hundreds of family relics from pedal to large, four-wheel drive tractors. He’s helped farmers keep working their fields and others get their tractor envied in the local parade.
Mike claims to be retired. While he has stopped working at his “town job” at the John Deere dealership in nearby Kahoka, he still serves as vice president of Lewis County Rural Electric Cooperative where he’s been a director since 2005, raises cattle on his farm and has a two-year waitlist of clients wanting their tractors restored. “I’m a busy guy, it’s just kind of bred into us,” he says. “A musician can’t let a guitar lay and I can’t let a wrench lay.”
Mike has been in a tractor for as long as he can remember. As a kid growing up on the farm they would do as much work as they could on their tractors, whether it be repair work or just making it look better.
In 1985, Mike started doing small jobs like painting tractors or “sprucing them up” as a way to make a little extra cash on the side. Over the course of 39 years, Mike’s work has transitioned from being almost completely about sprucing up tractors for the field to more of a focus on high-quality aesthetics.
“I try to offer an upscale field restoration where it can go work in the field and still look good to drive in the parade,” Mike says. “But I’ve also done full restorations for a tractor that will never see the field again. Especially now with all the technology in farming, some of these older tractors don’t have the technology or horsepower needed on a modern-day farm. So guys are wanting them fixed up to look pristine.” Mike says about 75% of the work he does on tractors is cosmetic.
Mike says that when he gets a new tractor in, he sits down with the customer and talks about what they want the final product to look like.
“It might not even run and we just have to figure out how much they want to get into it,” he says. “Sky’s the limit really, just depends how far and how into the details they want to go. We just have to get it stripped down to the nuts and bolts to see what we’re working with and come up with a plan and price. You can’t really give a quote on a nonrunning tractor without stripping it down.”
Mike says his goal is to complete one tractor per month, but he works on each one longer as there’s always three or four going at a time. He has to wait for parts or equipment to come in or paint to dry. “Maybe I’m painting a tractor and I’ve got a little pedal tractor that needs the same paint, I’m just going to do them together,” he says. “And if we have multiple tractor fenders that need to be painted, you can paint two just as easily as one.”
Mike says some of the more memorable tractors he’s worked include those with lower, and even No. 1, serial numbers. He’s currently in the middle of bringing back to life a set of International Harvester tractors for a client restoring the machines for his granddaughters.
“After we did a pink tractor for one of his granddaughters, he wanted to do more for the rest of them,” Mike says. “Well it’s not like it was a rare tractor or anything, they’re everywhere. I asked him if he wanted to do different colors. Now we’ve done a white and purple one and I’m working on a black one for him.”
Not unlike an artist, Mike gets his passion for his craft from taking the stripped down tractor and building it into something beautiful that the final caretaker will cherish.
“It’s a personal thing for me, like a sculptor who turns a rock into a sculpture,” he says. “Sculpture might be too fancy a word for us out here. But we drag tractors in here that might look like junk, not even run and are cobwebbed over. Then it’s incredible to see the tears in some of these old farmers’ eyes as the pristine tractor rolls out of here when it’s done.”
For more information, call 660-341-4835 or like Schantz Restorations LLC on Facebook.