Toys are for the young, and the young at heart. The Yorkton Farm Toy and Collectible Show is about bringing toy fans together to find new treasures and share old ones.
Farm toy collector John Orsten was one of the people trading at the event, both buying and selling. Orsten has over 800 toys, mostly farm toys, with a special interest in John Deere. Orsten’s main interest is restoration, taking the old toys he finds and bringing them back to life.
“I look for stuff I can redo, I don’t like buying new. I like the old stuff and fixing it up.”
He began restoring toys when he found an abandoned one of his own.
“We had an old house on the farm, and in those days we had no basement and you packed up dirt around the bottom to seal up the floor. We ended up selling it and when we moved it away there was a tractor from when I was a child. The tires were shot but the body was good... One day I saw it and thought ‘a-ha!’ I liked the way it looked, and that’s how it started.”
When it comes to finding toys, one of his main priorities is tires, Orsten says, because original tires are extremely difficult to find, and very expensive when you do. He wants to start with models that are as complete as possible for that reason. Otherwise, most of Orsten’s toys have had a full life in their first life as kids entertainment.
“Most of them have been played with, you get lots of old timers who come along and say they used to have one and wish they still made them.”
When he restores toys, Orsten often tries to make the toys a little bit different, trying to keep the same look as the vintage toys while also making something new. For example, a former mail truck became a prison transport, complete with a selection of inmates. He also builds toys from scratch, such as building a bale stacker after people started asking about them.
Sometimes restoring a toy means creative use of parts he can find. For example, a tanker truck required the use of a stove pipe to make a tank, welding each end shut which caused its own challenges.
“I soldered in one end, and I tried to do [the other] end, and every time I tried to line it up it fell down... I would have to shake it down and try to get it to sit right.”
The old toys have an advantage when it comes to restoring just because of the quality of the material. Orsten says he’s attempted to work with newer toys and compares them to a beer can, with cheap metal and plastic. With the old ones, the basic parts are high quality so it makes it much easier.
“You can work with this metal, clean it up, glass bead it or sandblast it and it won’t hurt it.”
While he restores toys, he says that original condition is the best, and if it has about eighty per cent of the paint on it still someone should keep it as is and not touch it.
In spite of some wild weather on Saturday, Orsten says it was a great show, with a packed house and a lot of people trading and talking about toys. For himself, Orsten says he found a John Deere 4320 that he has been looking for, because it matches one he has in real life but not as a toy.
The toy show raised $1,625 for Lipton Lipinski through ticket sales and a charity pedal tractor draw, with the tractor donated by Al and Marilyn Kuntz. Lipinski has cerebral palsy.
