Born and raised in Southern Minnesota, I’ve always had a passion for farm tractors and machinery. While in high school, I started working for the local IH dealer on Saturdays. My duties included cleaning the shop and hauling junk to the local dump, as well as emptying the scrap iron barrels onto the iron pile. At home, Dad had a Farmall 350 that needed a transmission job. I was able to find enough pieces of iron from the iron pile to build my first splitting stand.
I attended Austin Area Vocational Technical Institute receiving my degree in Farm Equipment Repair. Afterword, I enlisted in the US Navy Seabees as a Construction Equipment Mechanic. Upon returning from my tour of duty in Vietnam I went to work at an IH dealer as a mechanic. Many tractors were repaired in the 8 years I was there. The shop only had one splitting stand and there were many times that parts were on backorder and the splitting stand was tied up. To the scrap iron pile I went looking for steel to build another splitting stand. One day I was helping another mechanic remove a TA assembly from an 806 Diesel. He had everything unbolted and I was to help roll the TA out from under the fuel tank which was hanging from the ceiling. We balanced that large housing on a floor jack and I remember the 4 long bolts that he has screwed into the housing to serve as handles. Once the TA was out, it was lifted onto an old pallet that the mechanic had placed on two old sawhorses to be overhauled. That’s when I decided to build a TA handler that would make the repair much safer and easier.
I received notice of an opening for a Farm Eq. Mechanics instructor at the vo-tech I’d attended. I switched gears from the service industry to the education world. As an instructor, I saw many different tractors and had the need for splitting stands that were universal fitting many different tractors. I made many different stands each an improvement from the previous. While teaching, I started repairing tractors at home and building and selling splitting stands.
After 32 years of teaching, I retired and now have more time to refine my designs. Today, you will find my stands in many independent repair shop and tractor restoration repair shops. Innovative design and heavy materials are factors that go into each model of my tractor splitting stands. Eliminating dangerous block and jacks makes tractor repair much safer and easier. That’s why I say “Tractor splitting made easy from 45 years experience”.