Lamar man puts mechanical skills to use

David N. “Buddy” Stewart was born mechanically talented, so it’s little wonder that he worked in the machinery manufacturing shop at Sonoco Products Co. for 40 years before retiring in 2002.

And he had never heard of Sonoco until after he graduated from Lamar High School in 1958 and served four years in the Air Force. He worked on airborne radio and navigation equipment on B-52s while in the Air Force.

A friend told him to scope out employment at Sonoco. They liked what they saw and he liked what he saw. Sonoco hired him in 1962.

But Stewart hasn’t had time to get bored since he retired to his 2½-acre spread outside Lamar. He likes to say, “I do a lot of piddling around, doing this and that, and a little bit of gardening.”

Among his “piddling” projects is a 1947 Oliver 60 Row Crop tractor that he has fixed up. They no longer make Oliver tractors.

The tractor was purchased new by Rivers Scarborough, founder of the Egg and I Farm. Scarborough used it on his farm until he sold it to some of Stewart’s neighbors “down the road.” Stewart bought it two years ago.

“I started working on it and this is what I wound up with,” Stewart said, standing by the glistening tractor. “I did a lot of engine work on it, some sheet metal repair and a bunch of sandblasting, scraping and painting.”

Stewart rides around his yard “once in a while” on the tractor. He said he probably will have it on display at Lamar’s Egg Scramble Jamboree this spring.

“Mr. Scarborough liked the tractor a lot,” he said. “He even had a seat mounted at the back so that his wife could ride with him.”

Stewart found a 1947 S.C. license plate — D 51533 — to go on the back of the 18 horsepower tractor. He found it at “a farm back here behind us” when he was “just looking around one day and happened to see it.”

And he’s got six more tractors in his shop.

Among them are a 1940 John Deere L and a 1971 Economy Power King tractor model 2414.

The L was the smallest tractor Deere made during that time period. It has a two-cylinder engine that is rated at eight horsepower. It’s been an “every now and then project.”

The Economy was manufactured by the now-defunct Engineering Products Co.

“I bought the Economy from a guy in Chesterfield,” Stewart said. “I just painted it up, that was about all I had to do to it.”

Tractors aside, Stewart spends much of his time tinkering with scale models of Red Wing Thoroughbred Hit and Miss engines. Although they run on gasoline, he uses camp fuel because “it doesn’t smell as bad as gasoline.”

Stewart said “hit and miss” means “the engine fires up, then the engine quits running and then it fires up again.”

“These are just a grownup’s toy,” he said. “They’re really not good for much of anything.”

But Stewart made a water pump to fit on the back of one of them “just to make it look like it was good for something.”

He said the real hit-and-miss engines were used to cut fire wood, pump water, “you name it — anything they needed power for.”

Stewart has a machine shop in his garage that is home for two metal working lathes, a milling machine, drill press, bench grinders and “various other things.”

“I’ve always been mechanically talented,” he said.