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He Adds Motors To His Carved Toys
“This is my baby. It even sounds like a real Model T,” says Beryl Buffington about his amazing motorized toy pickup. He reaches behind the front bumper, flips a switch, and the toy he built sputters to life and starts to move.
  A little larger than 1/32-scale, it’s one of 3 motorized toys Buffington carved out of 1/8-in. thick cellular vinyl from old advertising signs. It’s flexible to cut, shape, sand and glue together – right down to details such as oil filters, throttles and brakes.
  Finished with genuine implement paints, the pieces look like metal, but their feather-light weight gives them away.
  As a retired lumberyard owner, the Woden, Iowa, man has more hoarded material to work with these days. His stash includes hundreds of battery-operated motors from handheld sprayers, remote toy motors and gears from old computer printers.
  The battery-powered sound and motion for the pickup come from the gears from an old printer and a worm gear he extended with heavy copper wiring that goes to a belt-driven motor to make the differential in the back.
  A 1905 Kelly Springfield steamroller has a toy remote racecar motor that Buffington geared down to 14 rpm’s with pencil sharpener gears. A 1954 Deere M Crawler runs off a lawn sprinkler motor.
  “The challenge with a motorized model is to get it laid out so it moves and yet looks like it’s supposed to,” Buffington says. He puts together the mechanical parts first, and then builds the toy around it.
  All his models – motorized and non-motorized – represent many hours of work and attention to detail.
  “The most challenging of the non-motorized models is a 1650 Oliver tractor with a front-mounted, 4-row cultivator,” Buffington says.
  He starts with photos he finds on the internet and in Farm Collector magazines to design his models. Some take 80 to 90 hrs. to complete.
  Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Beryl Buffington, P.O. Box 111, Woden, Iowa 50484 (ph 641 926-5380; berylsharon@wctatel.net).


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2013 - Volume #37, Issue #4