Nebraska farmer found father’s 1946 John Deere decades later and restored it

Some family heirlooms sit in attics or pass quietly from one generation to the next. For Nebraska farmer Shelley Bruha, his was a 1946 John Deere GM tractor, an old machine that disappeared from the family decades ago and was eventually found rusting beneath a tree on another Nebraska farm. What gave it away was not a serial number or a familiar paint job. It was a small modification made by his father many years earlier, after a childhood accident involving the tractor’s hand clutch, states an online report by Farm Progress. Scroll down to read the details.A childhood lesson in leverageAccording to the online report, when Bruha was young, he climbed onto his father’s open-station John Deere GM. The tractor’s hand clutch had recently been tightened, leaving the young driver without enough leverage to operate it properly.