They Laughed When the Teen Asked for Their Blown Engine Blocks — Nobody Knew What He Was Building
On a Tuesday morning in March of 1987, Emmett Vandermeer stood in the gravel lot behind his machine shop in Hardin County, Iowa, and watched a 17-year-old boy drag a cracked engine block out of his scrap pile without asking permission. The boy had a rusted out Farmall engine block under one arm and a notebook tucked under the other.
And he was moving with the kind of quiet purpose that Emmett had learned over 40 years of watching people to either admire or worry about. He watched the boy load it into the bed of a dented pickup truck that was older than the boy himself. And then, he watched the boy come back for another one. That was when Emmett walked outside.
“Those are scrap,” Emmett said. “I know,” the boy said. “That’s why I want them.” Emmett looked at the notebook. He looked at the boy’s hands, which were already grease-stained despite the early hour. He looked at the truck, which had three different colors of primer on the passenger door and a rear bumper held on with baling wire.
“How many do you need?” Emmett asked. “As many as you’ll give me,” the boy said. Emmett Vandermeer was not a man who gave things away easily. He had built his machine shop from a single lathe and $40 in 1951, and he had kept it running through the farm crisis of the early ’80s by being careful with everything he owned, including his scrap pile.
But, something about the boy’s answer stopped him. Not the boldness of it, the calmness. The boy wasn’t asking for charity. He wasn’t asking for permission, exactly. He was asking for material, the way a craftsman asks for material, because he already knew what he was going to make. “Take what you need.” Emmet said.
And then, because he couldn’t help [clears throat] himself, “What are you building?” The boy looked at him for a moment, as if deciding whether the answer was worth giving. “A foundry.” the boy said. And then, he went back to loading blocks. Let me tell you about Hardin County, Iowa, in 1987, because you need to understand the world this boy was walking into before you can understand what he walked out of it carrying.
Hardin County sits in the north-central part of the state, flat and practical. The kind of land that doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t offer apologies. The county had been corn and soybean country for as long as anyone could remember, which in Iowa means as long as anyone’s grandfather could remember, which is a long time.
The farms were family operations, most of them, running between 200 and 800 acres. And the equipment that kept them running was a combination of new iron bought on credit and old iron kept alive by ingenuity and baling wire, and the particular mechanical stubbornness that Midwestern farmers develop the way other people develop opinions.
There were three implement dealers within 20 miles of the county seat of Eldora. There was a co-op elevator on the edge of town that had been there since 1923. There was a parts counter at the John Deere dealer where a man named Dale Sievert had worked for 19 years and knew the serial number of every tractor that had ever come through the county, or so he claimed, and nobody had ever caught him wrong about it.
Dale Syfert was 44 years old in 1987, which meant he had been selling and ordering and diagnosing farm equipment since the boy in this story was not yet born. He had a particular way of standing at that parts counter that communicated, without a single word, that he had seen everything there was to see, and that whatever you were about to tell him was probably not going to surprise him.
He was not a cruel man. He was not even an unkind man. He was a man who had spent two decades becoming an authority, and he wore that authority the way some men wear good boots, naturally, without thinking about it, and with the unconscious assumption that everyone in the room could see the quality. Let me tell you about the boy, because the boy is the reason this story exists, and because you cannot understand what he built without understanding where he came from.
His name was Silas Bontrager. He was 17 years old in March of 1987, the second of four children on a 480-acre corn and soybean farm, 6 miles northeast of Eldora. His father, Leland Bontrager, was a careful farmer in the way that careful farmers are, methodical, attentive to detail, slow to change, and deeply skeptical of anything that hadn’t been proven on someone else’s land first.
Leland had farmed those 480 acres the same way his father had farmed them, which was the same way his grandfather had homesteaded them, which was with a deep conviction that the land rewarded consistency and punished experimentation. He was not wrong about this. He had a 30-year record of yields that proved he was not wrong about this.
But, he was also, as Silas had begun to notice around the age of 14, farming in a world that was changing in ways that consistency alone could not address. The farm crisis of the early 1980s had not destroyed the Bontrager operation, but it had bent it. Leland had taken on debt in the late ’70s when land values were climbing and the advice from every banker and extension agent in the county was to expand or fall behind.
He had bought an adjacent 160 acres at a price that looked reasonable in 1979 and looked catastrophic by 1983 when corn dropped to $2.20 a bushel and the interest on his operating loan was running at 18%. He had survived it. He had sold equipment, renegotiated terms, cut expenses to the bone, and survived it. But, surviving it had cost him something that didn’t show up on a balance sheet, which was the margin for error.
By 1987, Leland Bontrager was farming without a safety net, and he knew it, and he didn’t talk about it, and his son, Silas, knew it, too. Silas had been paying attention since he was old enough to sit at the kitchen table without being sent to bed. He had listened to his father’s conversations with the banker.
He had read the farm magazines that came to the house, not the articles about new herbicide programs or the advertisements for bigger planters, but the financial columns in the back that nobody else seemed to read. And somewhere around the age of 15, he had started keeping a notebook. The notebook was a standard composition book, the black and white marbled kind that cost 49 cents at the drugstore in Eldora.
By March of 1987, he was on his fourth one. They were full of numbers, not yield numbers or price projections, but engineering numbers. Tolerances, metallurgical specifications, casting temperatures, alloy compositions, heat treatment schedules. Because what Silas Bontrager had figured out sitting at that kitchen table and reading those back column financial articles and watching his father’s equipment costs eat into margins that were already thin enough to read through was that the single largest controllable
expense on a family farm was not seed or fertilizer or fuel. It was parts. Let me tell you about the parts problem because it is the reason this story exists. And because most people who have never farmed have no idea how deep it runs. A modern farm in 1987 ran on machinery that was increasingly sophisticated and increasingly expensive to repair.
A crankshaft for a John Deere 4440 cost $460 at the dealer. A cylinder head for an IH 1086 cost $380. Hydraulic pump housings, PTO shaft components, transmission cases. The list was long and the prices were not negotiable and they came from one place, which was a dealer. And the dealer’s prices were set by the manufacturer.
And the manufacturer’s prices reflected the cost of producing those parts in a factory with union labor and overhead and a profit margin that had nothing to do with the price of corn. When a farmer’s equipment broke down in the middle of planting or harvest, he paid whatever the dealer asked because he had no choice.
Because the alternative was watching his crop go in late or come out late. And in farming, late is another word for lost. Silas Bontrager had spent two years reading metallurgy textbooks he ordered through the county library’s interlibrary loan program. He had read a 1962 agricultural engineering manual he found at a farm auction for a quarter.
A manual that described in precise technical language how cast iron agricultural components were manufactured and what their material specifications were and how they could be reproduced by anyone with a furnace hot enough to melt iron and a pattern to cast from. He had read a 1974 foundry operations handbook that a vocational school in Ames had discarded.
He had read everything he could find about lost foam casting and green sand casting and the metallurgical differences between gray iron and ductile iron and which farm components required which. And he had concluded with the methodical certainty of someone who has done the math three times and gotten the same answer each time that a small foundry, a real foundry, not a hobby setup, capable of casting replacement agricultural parts from scrap iron could reduce his father’s parts costs by 60 to 70%.
Not a backyard forge, not a blacksmith shop, a foundry, a cupola furnace capable of reaching 2,800° F fed with coke and scrap iron capable of producing gray iron castings to agricultural specifications capable of making the parts that the dealer charged $400 for for $40 in material.
The cracked engine blocks from Emmett Vandermeer’s scrap pile were not junk to Silas Bontrager. They were raw material, gray iron already alloyed, already proven, already in the right metallurgical family for agricultural castings. Free for the taking because nobody else could see what they were. Let me tell you about the kitchen table conversation because it happened in February of 1987.
Six weeks before Silas went to Emmett’s scrap pile and because it is where this story actually began. Silas had waited for a Sunday evening after supper when his father was in the particular mood that follows a good meal and a quiet afternoon. Not relaxed exactly but open. He had his notebook on the table. He had a sheet of paper with two columns of numbers.
He had been preparing this for three weeks. “I want to build a foundry.” He said. Leland Bontrager set down his coffee cup. His wife Ruth who was washing dishes at the sink did not turn around but she stopped moving. “A foundry?” Leland said. “A small one.” “A cupola furnace.” “I can build it from scrap.” “The refractory lining costs about $60 in materials.
The coke to run it I can get from the implement dealers old stock. They’ve got a pile of foundry coke behind the warehouse they haven’t moved in 8 years. The patterns I can make from wood. I’ve already drawn them. He slid the notebook across the table. Leland looked at the notebook for a long moment without picking it up.
And what do you cast in this foundry? He said. Parts, Silas said. The parts we buy from Dale Seavert for three and four hundred dollars. I can cast them for 40. Cylinder heads, pump housings, transmission cases. I’ve got the specs from the engineering manuals. I’ve checked the tolerances against the OEM dimensions.
Gray iron is gray iron, Dad. The metallurgy doesn’t change because John Deere stamped their name on it. Leland was quiet for a long time. He picked up the notebook and looked at the numbers. He was not a man who dismissed numbers. He had spent 30 years living and dying by numbers. And he knew the difference between numbers that were wishful and numbers that were real.
You’re 17 years old, he said. The metallurgy doesn’t care how old I am, Silas said. Ruth turned from the sink. She dried her hands on a dish towel. She looked at her husband and then at her son. And then back at her husband. He’s been reading about this for two years, she said quietly. He knows what he’s talking about.
Leland looked at the two columns of numbers on the sheet of paper. Parts costs, current. Parts costs, projected. The gap between them was not small. “I need to think about it,” he said, but he didn’t close the notebook. Three days later, he told Silas he could use the old granary behind the machine shed, the one with the dirt floor and the leaking roof and the pigeons that had been nesting in the rafters since 1974.
He told him he could have it, and he told him he could have the scrap iron from the fence row, and he told him not to burn the building down. That was the permission. That was all of it, but it was enough. Let me tell you about Dale Seevert in the morning in April of 1987, because it is the moment that most people who were there still remember, and because it tells you everything you need to know about what Silas was walking into.
Silas had gone to the John Deere dealer on a Tuesday morning to look at a worn pump housing that was sitting in the used parts bin, not to buy it, but to borrow it long enough to make a pattern from it, which was a thing he had been doing quietly for 2 months with various worn components that farmers had discarded.
He had a system. He would borrow the worn part, make a wooden pattern from it in the granary, return the part, and then cast a new one from scrap iron. It was clean, it was methodical, and it had been working. Had. He had already cast four parts, two pump housings and two small transmission components that were sitting on the bench in the granary waiting to be tested.
Dale Seevert was at the counter when Silas came in, and there were three other men there, Arlo Crowley, who farmed 800 acres west of town and was the kind of man who held court the parts counter the way some men hold court at a bar, and two younger farmers whose names don’t matter to this story except as witnesses.
Silas explained what he wanted, to borrow the worn housing for a day to make a pattern. The silence lasted about 2 seconds. Then, Dale Seavert started laughing. It was not a mean laugh, exactly. It was the laugh of a man who has just heard something so far outside the boundaries of what he considers possible that his brain processes it as a joke before it can process it as a proposal.
It was the laugh of 19 years of expertise encountering something it had never been asked to consider, and it carried with it, the way that kind of laugh always carries, the absolute certainty that the person laughing knows more than the person being laughed at. “A foundry,” Dale said, “you’re going to cast John Deere parts in your granary?” “Yes,” Silas said.
“Son,” Arlo Crowley said, leaning on the counter with the particular ease of a man who has never had to justify his opinion to anyone. I’ve been farming since before you were born, and I’ve never heard anything quite that foolish. Cast iron agricultural parts require precision tolerances, they require controlled metallurgy, they require equipment that costs more than your daddy’s farm is worth.
What you’re describing is a way to blow yourself up and ruin a perfectly good granary.” Silas looked at Arlo Crowley for a moment. Then, he looked at Dale Seavert. “The tensile strength specification for gray iron agricultural castings is between 20,000 and 35,000 lbs per square inch, Silas said.
Standard cupola iron from automotive grade scrap runs 25,000 to 30,000 lbs per square inch. The tolerances on a hydraulic pump housing are plus or minus 12 thousandths of an inch on the bore diameter, which is achievable with a boring bar I can build from the lathe at the vocational school. The refractory lining I’m using is a 70/30 mix of fire clay and silica sand, which is rated to 3,200 degrees.
The parts I’ve already cast have been measured against OEM dimensions and are within spec. He paused. I’m not asking for your opinion. I’m asking to borrow a worn housing for 24 hours. The parts counter was quiet. Dale Seavert’s smile had not disappeared, but it had changed. It had gotten smaller and a little less certain, the way a smile gets when the person wearing it has just realized that the conversation is not going the way they expected.
I can’t lend out parts, Dale said. That’s not how we operate. I figured, Silas said, I’ll buy the worn one for scrap price then. Dale Seavert sold him the worn housing for $2.50, which was what it weighed in scrap iron at the going rate. He did it with the air of a man doing a favor for someone who didn’t know enough to know they were wasting their time.
Arlo Crowley watched Silas walk out of the dealership with the housing under his arm and said something to the other men at the counter that made them laugh, and the laugh followed Silas out to the parking lot, and he heard it through the glass door, and he kept walking. Now, let me pause here and ask you something.
When was the last time you heard someone laugh at an idea the way Dale Sievert and Arlo Crowley laughed at Silas Bontrager’s idea and the laugh turned out to be right? Think about that for a moment because that laugh, that particular laugh, the one that comes from experience and authority and the deep comfort of knowing how things are done, that laugh has a perfect record of being wrong at exactly the moments when it matters most.
It doesn’t laugh because the idea is bad. It laughs because the idea is unfamiliar and in Hardin County, Iowa in 1987, unfamiliar and wrong were the same word. Silas drove home with the worn pump housing on the seat beside him and his notebook on the dashboard and did not say anything to anyone about what had happened at the parts counter.
He went to the granary and he started making the pattern. Let me tell you about the granary because you need to see it to understand what Silas was actually doing in there and because the granary is where this story stops being about an idea and starts being about a thing. The old granary was 30 ft by 40 ft with a dirt floor and walls of rough cut oak planking that had been there since 1931.
The leaking roof Silas had patched with sheet metal he salvaged from a collapsed machine shed on the back of the property. The pigeons he had evicted with patience and a piece of hardware cloth. In the center of the floor, he had built his cupola furnace from a section of 12-in steel pipe he had cut from an old grain auger lined with the fireclay silica refractory mix he had ordered from a ceramic supplier in Cedar Rapids and mounted on a steel base he had welded himself using the wire feed welder his father kept in the machine
shed. The furnace stood 4 ft tall and had a tuyere, an air inlet, at the base connected to an electric blower he had salvaged from a discarded grain dryer. It had a tap hole at the bottom for the molten iron and a slag notch 6 in above it. It was, by any objective measure, a real foundry furnace. Small, but real.
Capable of melting 40 lb of iron per heat, which was enough for most agricultural castings. The flask for his green sand molds he had built from scrap lumber. The molding sand he had made from a mixture of bank sand and bentonite clay, which he had sourced from a pottery supply company in Iowa City after reading that bentonite was the standard binder for green sand foundry work.
The patterns were carved from white pine, sealed with shellac, and stored on a shelf he had built along the west wall. By April of 1987, he had patterns for seven different agricultural components, all of them drawn from worn or broken originals that farmers in the county had discarded or sold to him for scrap price.
He worked in the grainery every evening after school and every weekend. His younger sister, who was 14 and considerably more practical than anyone else in the family, had started keeping a log of his material costs without being asked. His mother brought sandwiches to the grainery on Saturday afternoons without commenting on the smell of hot iron, which is a smell that gets into everything and does not leave easily.
His father walked through the granary once in late March, looked at the furnace and the patterns and the flask and the shelf of finished castings, and said nothing. But, he picked up one of the finished pump housings and turned it in his hands for a long time, feeling the surface, checking the bore with his thumb, and then he set it down and walked out without saying anything.
And Silas understood this as encouragement. The first real test came in late April, when Leland Bontrager’s 4240 John Deere threw a hydraulic pump housing. Cracked it clean through on a Tuesday afternoon during field preparation, which is the worst possible time to lose hydraulic function on a row crop tractor.
Leland came in from the field at 4:00 and called the John Deere dealer and was told the housing was not in stock and would need to be ordered with a lead time of four to seven business days. Four to seven business days in late April in Iowa is not a parts delay. It is a planting delay. And a planting delay in Iowa is measured not in days, but in bushels per acre, because every day of late planting past the optimal window costs yield, and yield is money, and money is what keeps the lights on.
Leland hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen for a moment. Then, he walked out to the granary. Silas already had the pattern on the bench. He had made it 3 weeks earlier from a worn housing he had bought from a neighbor for $1.50. “How long?” Leland asked. “I need to run a heat,” Silas said. “4 hours start to finish.
Casting, cooling, boring, fitting. Leland looked at his son. He looked at the furnace. He looked at the shelf of finished castings. “Do it.” he said. “Let me tell you about the next 4 hours because they are the reason this story is still being told.” Silas charged the furnace at 5:00 in the afternoon with a mix of foundry coke and scrap iron from the pile of engine blocks he had accumulated from Emmett Vandermeer’s shop and two other machine shops in the county.
He lit the coke bed with kindling and diesel soaked rags and started the blower at low speed. Then brought it up as the coke caught and the temperature began to climb. The furnace chuffed and roared in the way that small cupolas do. Not the overwhelming thunder of an industrial operation, but a contained purposeful sound like a locomotive breathing at idle.
The heat came up through the stack in visible waves that bent the air above the grainery roof. His sister stood at the door with the cost log and a stopwatch because she had decided this was a data point worth recording. At 6:15, the iron was ready. Silas could tell by the color. A brilliant orange-white that was not quite yellow, not quite white.
The specific color that the metallurgy textbooks described as indicating a temperature between 2,600 and 2,800° Fahrenheit. He tapped the furnace and the iron ran into the ladle in a stream that threw sparks and lit the grainery like a second sunset. He poured the mold in a single continuous motion filling the sprue and watching the iron rise in the riser until it confirmed that the cavity was full.
Then, he set the ladle down and waited. The casting cooled for 40 minutes. He broke the mold, cleaned the casting with a wire brush, cut the sprue and riser with a hacksaw, and took it to the lathe at the vocational school in Eldora. He had arranged after hours access with the shop teacher, a man named Harold Gustafson who had recognized early that Silas Bontrager was the kind of student you made arrangements for.
He bored the housing to specification in 40 minutes, checked the dimensions against his reference drawing, and drove back to the farm. He fitted the housing to the pump at 9:47 in the evening. Leland was there holding a flashlight. The housing seated correctly. The bolt pattern aligned. The bore clearance was within tolerance.
Leland started the tractor and brought the hydraulics up to pressure, and the pump ran without a leak, without a noise, without a single indication that the housing had been made that afternoon from scrap iron in a grainery by a 17-year-old who had taught himself foundry metallurgy from library books. Leland Bontrager stood beside that tractor for a long moment with the flashlight hanging at his side and the engine running and the hydraulics cycling, and he did not say anything.
Then, he reached over and put his hand on his son’s shoulder, which was not a thing Leland Bontrager did often or lightly. “How much did it cost?” he said. “$11.40,” Silas said, “in materials. The scrap iron was free.” The dealer’s price for the OEM housing was $390 plus freight plus the cost of 4 to 7 days of downtime during planting.
Leland nodded slowly. He looked at the tractor. He looked at the grainery where the furnace was cooling and the light was still on and the smell of hot iron and coke smoke was drifting across the yard. “You were right.” He said. It was quiet and direct, the way Leland Bontrager said everything, and it was enough.
They planted on schedule. Let me tell you about what happened over the next 2 years because the story doesn’t end in that grainery on a Tuesday evening in April and because the next 2 years are where the real shape of what Silas built becomes visible. Word travels in a county of that size the way water travels in flat ground, slowly finding the lowest path, but eventually reaching everywhere.
By the end of the 1987 growing season, three neighbors had come to Silas with broken components. A PTO shaft housing from the farm to the north, a transmission case end cap from a neighbor 2 miles east, a hydraulic cylinder end from a man who had driven past the Bontrager place three times before he stopped because he was embarrassed to admit he was considering it.
Silas cast all three parts. He charged them for materials and a small amount for his time. Never more than 30% of the dealer price, usually less. He kept records in the composition book. By the spring of 1988, he had a waiting list. By the fall of 1988, he had expanded the grainery operation with a second flask and a larger ladle, and he’d added ductile iron capability by sourcing magnesium ferrosilicon inoculant from a foundry supply company in Davenport, which allowed him to cast parts that required higher tensile strength and
ductility than gray iron could provide. He was 16 farmers deep on his list, and he was turning away work because he could not process it fast enough alone. His sister had taken over the bookkeeping entirely, and had started keeping a second log of what each farmer would have paid at the dealer versus what they paid Silas, which she called the savings column, and which by the end of 1988 totaled a number that made Leland Bontrager sit down when he saw it.
The number was $14,700. $14,700 in parts cost that had stayed in the pockets of Hardin County farmers instead of going to the manufacturer. Dale Sievert heard about this. He heard about it the way people in small counties hear about things, gradually, through fragments, at the parts counter and the co-op and the cafe on Main Street.
Each fragment a little more specific and a little more alarming than the last. He heard that the Bontrager kid was casting pump housings. Then he heard that the Bontrager kid was casting transmission cases. Then he heard the number. $14,700. And the smile that had been on his face at the parts counter in April of 1987 was no longer there.
He drove out to the Bontrager farm on a Saturday morning in November of 1988. Silas was in the grainery when he arrived, running a heat. Dale Sievert stood in the doorway of the granary and looked at the furnace and the patterns and the shelf of finished castings and the waiting list written on a chalkboard on the wall.
And he was quiet for a long time. “That’s a real foundry.” Dale said. “Yes.” Silas said. He was monitoring the furnace temperature and did not look up. “You could get in trouble casting parts for commercial sale, liability issues, no certifications.” Silas set down his temperature probe and looked at Dale Sievert for the first time since he had walked in.
“I remember you telling me I’d blow myself up and ruin a perfectly good granary.” Silas said. “I believe those were Arlo Crowley’s exact words and you were laughing when he said them.” Dale Sievert had the decency to look uncomfortable. “I was wrong about that.” he said. It cost him something to say it. You could see it cost him something.
“The liability question is real.” Silas said. “I’ve been talking to an attorney in Eldora about it. The answer is to certify the material. Have the castings tested by an independent lab. I’ve been sending samples to a metallurgical lab in Cedar Rapids since June. Every batch. The results are in that binder on the bench.
You’re welcome to look at them.” Dale looked at the binder. He did not pick it up. “What do you want?” Dale said. It was a direct question and it was the right question and it told Silas that Dale Sievert was underneath the 19 years of authority and the parts counter certainty a practical man. “I want to keep doing what I’m doing.” Silas said.
“And eventually I want to do it bigger. There are 200 farms in this county and probably 800 in the surrounding four counties that have the same parts cost problem. I’m one kid with a 40-lb cupola. I’m not your competition. I’m the thing that happens when your competition, the manufacturer, prices farmers out of their own equipment.
” Dale Seavert stood in the doorway of that grainery for another minute, looking at the furnace and the chalkboard and the binder of metallurgical test results. Then, he said something that surprised Silas and that Silas would remember for the rest of his life. “My grandfather was a blacksmith,” Dale said.
“He made parts, too, for a while, anyway. Then, the factories got big enough that it stopped making sense.” He paused. “I’m not sure it stopped making sense. I think we just stopped paying attention.” He left without saying anything else, but 3 weeks later, he called Silas and told him that the dealer had a collection of worn cores, original parts returned by customers that were too damaged to rebuild, but intact enough to serve as patterns, that were scheduled to be shipped back to the manufacturer for credit.
He offered them to Silas instead for nothing. 43 worn cores, representing 43 different components, all of them with OEM dimensions that Silas could measure and pattern from. It was not an apology, but it was something better than an apology. It was a man who had laughed at an idea deciding to help it instead.
Let me tell you about the spring of 1989 because that is when the story stopped being about one farm and one granary and started being about something larger. Silas graduated from high school in May of 1989. He did not go to college, which was the subject of exactly one conversation with his father, which lasted about 4 minutes and ended with Leland saying, “You know what you’re doing.
” Which was both a statement and a permission. He took the money he had earned from casting parts over the previous 2 years, $4,200, carefully saved, every dollar recorded in the composition book, and he used it to buy a larger cupola furnace, a used one from a closed foundry in Waterloo that had been a gray iron casting shop for farm equipment manufacturers until the consolidation of the late ’70s had put it out of business.
The furnace was a 200-lb per heat unit, five times the capacity of his granary cupola. He bought it for $800, which was approximately 4 cents on the dollar of what it had cost new. He also, in that same spring, filed for a business license under the name Bontrager Agricultural Castings, which was a name he had thought about for 2 years and which said exactly what the business did without any ornamentation.
He rented a small industrial building on the south edge of Eldora, a former implement repair shop, concrete floor, overhead crane, three-phase power, for $220 a month. He moved the granary operation to the industrial building over a single weekend with help from his father and two of the farmers who had become regular customers.
He hired his sister, who was 16 and had been running his books for 2 years, as his office manager, which she accepted with the air of someone formalizing an arrangement that had already been in place for some time. By the end of 1989, Bontrager Agricultural Castings had 37 regular customers across Hardin County and four adjacent counties.
It had produced castings for John Deere, International Harvester, Allis-Chalmers, and Oliver Equipment. It had a binder of metallurgical test results from the Cedar Rapids lab that was now 3 in thick. It had a savings column in the books that, by the end of the year, showed $47,000 in parts costs that had stayed in the region instead of going to manufacturers.
And it had, on the shelf above the new furnace, the original composition book. The first one, the black and white marbled kind that cost 49 cents, which Silas had kept there not as a trophy, but as a reference, because everything in it was still true. The metallurgy hadn’t changed. The tolerances hadn’t changed.
The principle hadn’t changed, which was that gray iron is gray iron, and a casting made correctly from scrap iron is the same part as a casting made correctly from virgin iron. And the only difference between them is who you paid to make it. Let me tell you about what happened to Arlo Crowley, because his part of this story is short, but it is important.
Arlo Crowley came to Bontrager Agricultural Castings in the fall of 1990. He came on a Thursday afternoon, alone, without calling ahead, and he stood in the doorway of the industrial building the same way Dale Seevert had stood in the doorway of the grainery two years earlier, looking at the furnace and the patterns and the chalkboard and the binder and the overhead crane.
He had a cracked transmission housing from an Allis-Chalmers 7080 under his arm, which was a large casting, a complicated one, the kind that would have cost him over $500 at the dealer. Silas was at the furnace. He looked up. “I need a casting,” Arlo said. Silas looked at the housing under Arlo’s arm. He looked at Arlo Crowley, who was a big man, a confident man, a man who had been holding court at the parts counter since before Silas was born, and who was now standing in a doorway with a cracked transmission housing and the specific
discomfort of someone who knows they’re about to ask for something from a person they once laughed at. “I remember you telling me I was going to blow myself up,” Silas said, “and ruin a perfectly good grainery.” Arlo had the grace to look at the floor for a moment. “I was wrong,” he said. Just that. Three words, no decoration.
Silas nodded. He took the housing and set it on the bench and began measuring it. “Come back Thursday,” he said. “I’ll have it ready.” The housing cost Arlo Crowley $62. The dealer price would have been 540. Arlo Crowley became a regular customer. He never held court at the parts counter about Silas Bontrager again, and when other farmers asked him about the kid with the foundry, he told them, without any qualification, that they should go see him.
That is not a small thing. In a county of that size, a man like Arlo Crowley changing his opinion and saying so out loud is worth more than any advertisement. Let me tell you about the years that followed because the story doesn’t end in 1990, and because the years that followed are where the real permanence of what Silas built becomes clear.
By 1993, Bontrager Agricultural Castings had 62 regular customers across six counties. It had added a second furnace and hired two employees. Both of them young men from farming families who had grown up with equipment and understood what they were making and why it mattered. It had a relationship with the metallurgical lab in Cedar Rapids that had evolved from simple batch testing to a standing arrangement where the lab certified each production run, which meant that Silas’s castings came with documentation that the OEM parts
did not. His sister, who had turned 19 and was studying accounting at Iowa State while still running the books remotely, had pointed out that this was a competitive advantage, and she was right. Farmers who bought from Bontrager Agricultural Castings knew exactly what they were getting, down to the tensile strength and hardness of each casting because it was in the paperwork.
In 1994, Silas was invited to present at the Iowa Farm Bureau’s annual meeting in Des Moines, which was a thing that nobody had expected and that Silas himself had not sought out. The invitation came because a Farm Bureau field representative named Harlan Peterson had heard about the operation from a farmer in Hardin County and had driven out to see it and had then written a report that circulated within the organization and eventually reached someone who thought it was worth putting in front of the membership.
Silas drove to Des Moines in the same pickup truck, now 11 years old, with the same baling wire on the rear bumper, and he stood in front of 400 farmers and told them in plain language what and why and how much it had saved the farmers who used it. He had a slide, a single slide on an overhead projector, that showed two numbers.
The dealer price and the Bontrager price for 23 common agricultural castings. The gap between the two columns averaged 63%. The room was quiet when he finished. Then it was not quiet. Leland Bontrager was in the audience. He had driven down from Eldora that morning without telling Silas he was coming because he was not a man who made announcements about things like that.
He sat in the fourth row in his good coat and his clean boots, and when the room started applauding, he stood up. He was not the first person to stand, but he was the one Silas saw first because Silas was looking for him and because a father standing up in a room of 400 people is a thing a son does not miss.
Let me tell you one last thing because the story has a shape that extends past 1994 and because the shape of it matters. Bontrager Agricultural Castings is still operating. It is larger now, a proper industrial building on the south edge of Eldora. Two furnaces, eight employees, a quality management system that would satisfy any auditor, and a customer list that spans 12 counties in Iowa and three in Illinois.
Silas Bontrager is not 17 years old anymore. He is a man in his 50s who still works at the furnace himself on most days because he believes that the person running the operation should understand the operation from the inside, which is a belief he formed at 17 and has not found any reason to revise. The original granary is still standing on the Bontrager farm.
Leland Bontrager died in 2009 and the farm passed to Silas’s younger brother who farms it with the same methodical care that Leland brought to it for 30 years. The granary has a new roof, a proper one, not salvaged sheet metal. And the dirt floor has been poured with concrete and there’s a small plaque on the inside wall that says in plain lettering, “First heat, April 22nd, 1987.
$11.40.” The original composition book is in a frame on the wall beside the plaque, behind glass, opened to the page where Silas first worked out the refractory mix calculations for the cupola lining. His daughter, who is 19 years old and studying material science at Iowa State, came home for Thanksgiving 2 years ago and sat at the kitchen table after dinner and put a notebook on the table.
Not a composition book, a laptop with a spreadsheet open. She had been reading about additive manufacturing, 3D printing of metal components, specifically directed energy deposition of tool steel and stainless, which is a process that is currently expensive and industrial scale, but is moving, she said, toward small shop capability on a timeline that she had researched and documented.
“I think we could do it,” she said. “In 5 years, maybe 7. The equipment costs are coming down the same way the foundry equipment costs came down. And the parts problem is the same problem. It’s just a different material and a different process.” Silas looked at the spreadsheet. He looked at his daughter.
He looked at the kitchen table, which was the same table where he had sat in February of 1987 and told his father he wanted to build a foundry. And his father had said he needed to think about it. “Yes,” Silas said. Not “I need to think about it.” Not “Let me see the numbers.” Yes. Because he already knew what the numbers said.
He’d seen them before in a different notebook on a different evening. When he was the one sitting across the table with an idea that the room was not ready for. The parts counter at the John Deere dealer in Eldora is still there. Dale Seavert retired in 2001. The man who replaced him is younger, competent, well-intentioned, and has never heard of Bontrager Agricultural Castings.
Because by the time he arrived, Silas’s customers had stopped going to the parts counter for the components that Silas cast, which was a long list of components, and they had never explained why. They just stopped coming for those parts. And the new man behind the counter assumed it was because the equipment had gotten more reliable, which was not wrong, exactly.
It just wasn’t the whole story. The whole story is in the grainery behind glass in a 49-cent composition book. Silas Bond Traeger dragged a cracked engine block out of a scrap pile when he was 17 years old. They laughed. The parts bill came. The dealer was out of stock. The foundry ran. The tractor planted on time.
He built a world that worked. And now his daughter is going to build the next one.
