![]() Actual shop time was backed up by extensive research. “This turned out to be pretty simple.”Īnd so began what would become a 20-year process of rebuilding parts for the vintage engine. “I’ve gotten into a lot worse projects,” he said. “It had been laying out in the open for a while, and it was half in pieces.īut Jerry – with more than 40 years’ experience in welding – knew the Witte could be restored. “It did look kind of impossible when we first looked at it,” Jerry said. Harold had asked Jerry, owner of Jerry’s Welding and Machine, Wichita, for his help in rebuilding the Witte. That was all the challenge Jerry Abplanalp needed. “I don’t know why he’s messing with that,” he said. Even Harold’s brother – an accomplished machinist and welder – scowled at the prospect of restoration. To most, it looked like an uphill battle. The brass had been stripped off and was long gone. The engine’s steel parts had already been removed from the cast iron: the portable truck wheels, crankshaft, sideshaft and connecting rod had all been torched off and shipped out. But Ottaway could have what was there, for 3 cents a pound (about $180). His source was right: Jones said that the engine had been cut up, and much of it had already been loaded onto a rail car. Harold immediately contacted Harold Jones, owner of the Duncan, Okla., salvage yard. In 1961, the call came: The owner had died, and the engine had been sold to a salvage yard, where it was being scrapped. A friend of Harold’s kept an eye on the engine as he passed through that area each year. The owner, though, wouldn’t part with it. The engine had spent much of its life on a small farm in southwestern Oklahoma. In its prime, this circa-1915 Witte 30 hp “sideshaft” portable gas engine was used to power a thresher.īut by the time Harold Ottaway, Wichita, Kan., got hold of it, the engine had fallen on hard times indeed. ![]()
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