This is Rumble Strip. I'm Erica Heilman.

We didn't even put a new head gasket, just put some grease on the head gasket.

Some old farmer or something said that would work,

and put the engine back into the car, and it wouldn't start.

It wouldn't even turn over. So we said, okay, not a problem.

We get a tractor. We'll tow it to start it.

That's my friend Ralph Rockwell, and I have no idea what he's talking about. But I love

listening to Ralph talk about how he takes tractors and cars apart, and he puts them back together

again. He's been doing this since he was like 15, and now he's 72, and he is still learning how to increase the tractor wheel

rim size to increase traction without killing the horsepower or the engine torque.

He's still curious.

He's still figuring it out.

And Ralph speaks about these tractors with great attention to their provenance.

This begat, this begat that. It is biblical.

In the summer, Ralph competes in antique tractor poles.

And I asked him if I could come over and talk about the tractor he was working on at the time, which was a 1953 for Jubilee, and I asked if I could

tag along to a tractor pole. So here is Ralph Rockwell. When I was like 15 years old and in high

school, anytime I had a chance in study hall, I'd get any kind of books on auto mechanics, anything I could read

up on and just do the research on. And then our first cars, we were just always tinkering on them.

My couple of friends, Woody and Beanie, get a a car and we'd always look for something that

needed some work done something you could buy cheap and work on the mountain the dooryard use my

father's farm tractor to pull the engine out of a 57 Chevy first engine rebuilt I ever did. I hate to say, it never, it never ran. I had no

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