After you’ve prepared your decals, painted the tractor, and applied those decals onto your antique tractor, it’s time for the final step in your restoration: lettering.
Tharran grew up on a grain and livestock farm in north central Kansas, where the family's main crops were wheat, grain sorghum and alfalfa for a small dairy herd. 2024 will mark Tharran's 50th year as a writer. He is a contributor to Successful Farming and Ageless Iron. metal stamping
This is the third in a three-part series on restoring antique tractors. The first two articles are here and here. This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 Ageless Iron Almanac.
Up to this point in tractor finishes, we’ve talked about paint and decals. However, there’s another category that often applies to a restoration, depending on the vintage of the tractor: lettering. This is most often a brand name found on cast parts and tractor emblems, and often found on the hood or side panels.
Let’s start with raised lettering, since it’s found on the oldest tractors. It was common to cast the brand name into the radiator housing on early vintage tractors, whether it was a John Deere, Hart Parr, Allis-Chalmers, or Twin City. Some manufacturers, including John Deere, even cast the brand name into the rear axles.
No matter what the lettering, Louis Spiegelberg, owner of Spiegelberg Restoration and Service in Amherst, Ohio, advises that you don’t rush.
“The surface has usually been sandblasted prior to painting, and I always make sure the base coat on the tractor has had time to dry thoroughly,”he says. “I usually use a polyurethane, so that means I wait at least a week. If you use an alkyd enamel, I would give it at least two weeks.”
As for painting the lettering itself, Spiegelberg says he has tried everything from sponge brushes to artist brushes. He’s found that a brush set from an art supply or craft store works the best.
“If you get a cheap set, like kids would use in school, you’ll find that the bristles come out too easily and they’ll end up in the paint,” he adds. Heal ways starts by painting around the edges of the letters and then filling in the center.
Then he applies up to three coats to the lettering, letting each coat dry a few hours or overnight. He recommends several thin coats, rather than one thick coat, to help reduce brush marks.
However, one sign painter featured on YouTube says he prefers a thicker coat of pinstriping paint that he dabs on with a sponge brush.
Ford began embossing their script insignia into the sheet-metal hood, followed later by embossed letters on the rear fenders with the Model 8N. The challenge, of course, is neatly applying the red paint to the script without getting paint on the surrounding sheet metal.
If you choose to paint the lettering and don’t feel you can do it freehand, several companies offer a painting mask for both the hood and the fenders that can be placed over the script. Steiner Tractor Parts (steinertractor.com), for example, has a mask kit available that includes two stencils each for the hood and the fenders, since each mask can only be used once.
According to the instructions, you peel off the backing and place the mask over the letters, being careful to burnish down all the edges.Steiner recommends applying a fine mist of water to both surfaces so the mask can be adjusted to the correct position if necessary. After the surface is dry, paint the logo with several light coats of paint, rather than one or more heavy coats.
Several vendors offer a set of die-cut decals with each letter individually cut to lay right on top of the raised lettering. You can find them at Steiner Tractor Parts, Just8Ns(just8ns.com), and Dennis Carpenter (dennis-carpenter.com).
Sometimes a tractor name isn’t incorporated into raised letters or a decal. It is simply painted onto the surface of the sheet metal. That was the case with a rare 20-hp IHC Type D Titan tractor restored by Chris Hudson, owner of Hudson Tractor Restoration and Repair in Grass Lake, Michigan. Fortunately, Hudson’s wife was able to use photographs, measurements, and Cricut Design Space software to create a template for the tractor name and vintage IH logo.
Like Spiegelberg, Hudson says he prefers brushes in various sizes that have “super-fine” bristles to paint the lettering, whether it’s raised letters on cast iron or within a template.
“The Titan also included a lot of pinstriping and scroll designs, which a friend helped me with using a Beugler pinstriping tool and 1Shot pinstriping lettering enamel,” Hudson says. “I also used the 1Shot lettering paint with the templates,” he adds. “It just has a different consistency that works better in that situation.”
Once styled tractors came on the scene, manufacturers started using emblems to identify the tractor brand or model. Most are mounted on the front of the hood, but some tractors, particularly International Harvester models, used them on the side panels to designate the model number.
In most cases, the grille-mounted emblem and/or name strips are readily available, either through a specialty store like Dennis Carpenter (Ford) and Korves Oliver (korvesoliver.com) or a multi-brand dealer like Steiner Tractor Parts or All States Ag Parts (tractorpartsasap.com).
If the emblems on a restoration have been damaged, which was easy to do on the grille-mounted versions, the easiest thing to do is replace them with are production. However, you need to know what’s original if you’re going for accuracy. Spiegelberg says some John Deere models used a grille or front emblem with the leaping deer, while others had the brand name added below the leaping deer emblem. Also, some reproductions are made of plastic, which may or may not look authentic.
“You’ll find different ranges of quality out there, so you have to watch what you’re getting,” he says. “Others are still nearly impossible to find. For example, I had an IH 1456 GoldDemonstrator that I was restoring. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the 1456 model number emblem from any suppliers. I finally found one that had been 3D printed, but even that was far from the quality of the original.”
steel sand casting Nobody said tractor restoration would be easy. If you’re lucky, you might not have anything to worry about besides decals, and can forget about templates, bent nameplates, and damaged grille emblems. But what fun would that be?