🚜 Scrap Drive: Learning How to Improvise a DIY Tractor

How a homemade tractor, a spring blizzard, and a whole lot of Glover pride taught me what leadership looks like when the road disappears.

We needed a tractor, but couldn’t afford one.
So we built it—from scrap, sweat, and a 1940s Willys engine we hauled home on a borrowed flatbed.

Ford wheels. Chevy steering. Chains forged from busted knuckles and blind faith.

It wasn’t pretty. But it pulled.

A DIY Tractor Built with Perseverance and Ingenuity

One blizzard morning, my dad and his best friend Harold Wilson fired it up and started clearing Pearl Street—belching smoke, pushing snow, and grinning like boys let loose with life-sized Tonka toys.

Dennis and I watched from the porch steps, frozen solid and wide-eyed. That day, our tractor didn’t just move snow. It moved something deeper.

It pulled us closer to manhood.
Closer to legacy.
Closer to understanding what it means to build something that lasts.

Close to knowing, without a doubt, that where there’s a will there’s a way. A crash course in creativity and resourcefulness.

That tractor wasn’t just a machine.
It was a memory on four wheels. A masterclass in making momentum from what you’ve got.

It wasn’t bought. It was built. And so were we.

The real Scrap Drive before we ever bolted on the Willys engine—but the bones were already there.

📍Series Note
This story lives inside my memoir-in-progress: Barefoot and Bulletproof: The Dirty Little Glover Boys—a defiant, cinematic roar against fading memory, told through wild rides, scraped knees, and the kind of stories that stick.

Every Tuesday, I post a new story here and a life lesson from it on LinkedIn.

📘 If you're new here, start with the story that launched it all:
👉 realchatrat.substack.com/p/your-free-chapter-full-speed-stupid

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