Harvey Thies uses his knowledge of tractors

**Harvey Thies is pictured with some of his sewing machine tractors at the Ron Kuhlmann Memorial Farm Toy Show on December 3.** Photo by Gordon Wolf

Harvey Thies has worked with tractors so long that he can find their shape in other objects – specifically sewing machines.

For the past several years, he has been transforming old sewing machines into replicas of tractors, or sewing machine tractors, as they are sometimes called.

It started when he and his wife, Lynette, were at a flea market and saw that one vendor had a couple tractors fashioned from sewing machines.

“They had just put some wheels on them and painted the sewing machines,” said Harvey. “I thought that was a cute idea.”

He ended up buying three sewing machines that day at the flea market.

“They sat around for maybe a year before I ever got around to trying it, and then I made a couple,” he said.

Harvey added that the tractors he saw at the flea market were somewhat crudely put together, and he wanted to make his better than those.

“So I just kept refining them a little bit,” he said.

To date, Harvey has converted 16 old sewing machines into tractor replicas.

He doesn’t make them to sell. It is just a hobby.

**Pictured are a few of the sewing machine tractors that Harvey Thies had on display at the Ron Kuhlmann Memorial Farm Toy Show.** Photo by Gordon Wolf

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**Ashley Rosener and her grandfather, Harvey Thies, pictured after completing Ashley’s sewing machine tractor project in 2018.** Submitted Photo

Picking the right type of sewing machine is important. Harvey prefers the newer sewing machines made of aluminum or plastic that have straight sides, not the old-fashioned machines that are not uniform in shape, although he has used some of them.

Harvey has been restoring tractors for 25 years and now does it with his son, John, so he is well acquainted with the shapes of many types of tractors.

“A lot of times if you look at them long enough, something about the sewing machine will remind you of a certain tractor and you just kind of go off that,” he said.

When Harvey first started his hobby, he had to search a little bit for old sewing machines. Then the Mapleton paper ran a story about Harvey. The article was seen by a woman in Blair, Nebraska, who ran a sewing machine repair shop.

“She called me and asked how many I wanted,” said Harvey. “She had a whole garage full of these old machines. I went to Blair, and she gave me all I could stack in a pickup.”

Harvey now has an abundance of old sewing machines for a hobby that he does only occasionally.

“It's just kind of when I get the inkling to do another one,” he said. “I kind of have to start getting bored, and I still work in the shop with my son with his tractor restorations, so I’m usually pretty busy. But there are times I get a notion, or I see something that gets me going again.”

Harvey has to get creative when it comes to details on the tractors.

“A lot of the fenders are made out of frying pans. For a seat on a tractor, I might use a soup ladle; it’s kind of cupped like an old seat,” he said. “And I’ve used fishing sinkers for headlights. You just have to get inventive.”

Harvey said the more modern sewing machines are more difficult to transform into tractor replicas.

“They’re made of aluminum or plastic, and you can't weld on them. So you have to figure out a way to bolt a steel plate to the machine so you can start building off that steel,” he said.

The older style treadle sewing machines have their challenges, too.

“It takes you half a day or a day to clean one up. You have to take everything out of them, weld the holes shut and smooth them out before you start to build,” Harvey said. “There’s more to it than people think.”

There was one old sewing machine that Harvey had difficulty transforming into a tractor replica because he imagined what it had meant to the person who had used it.

“I just hardly had the heart to tear it apart. It had a cabinet with drawers. The lady who had the machine had all her needles and threads in there, and I thought she probably thought the world of this machine. When I was tearing it apart, I kind of didn’t feel good about that.”

The projects that stick out in Harvey’s mind are the ones he did with his granddaughters, Ashley and Sara Rosener.

Earlier this year, Sara wanted to make a sewing machine tractor that looked like a 1965 Farmall 1206 because Harvey had previously owned that model tractor.

Harvey’s daughter, Angie Rosener, explained, “He bought it in December of 1977 from the International dealer in Moorhead. In 1999, after owning it for 22 years, he traded it in for a more modern cab tractor,” Angie said.

Before starting on the project Harvey told Sara, “If you’re going to make this one, you have to do all the welding.

“She had never welded before, so I had to teach her how,” Harvey said. “She did really well, and I was proud of her.”

The tractor replica Harvey made with Ashley was a Farmall tractor made out of an antique sewing machine.

“Dad has lived on the farm his entire life (77 years),” Angie Rosener said. “One of his dad's (Elmer Thies') first tractors was a 1920/1930s Farmall Regular, so that's why he and Ashley chose to make that model for her sewing machine tractor.”

That project went to the State Fair where it was also entered into a contest sponsored by the International Harvester Collector’s Club. Ashley won $350. That was in 2018.

“She was pretty happy about that,” said Harvey. “Even to this day, she’s in college and she still remembers all the parts of the tractor we made, so it kind of does my heart good to think maybe I taught her a little bit.”