This project was exciting for me at first and still would have been had I not began to have more health problems.  In the late fall shortly after the last update, my 'ol ticker started acting up again.  Having had open heart surgery back in 1989, being relatively young back then at the age of 44 and thinking that I was healed forever with the surgery, I jumped straight into this project with my brother Gary (as you might have read).

The four grafts that I had done in the 1989 surgery began to close up in late 1997.  Within a two year period of time beginning in November of 1997, I had two arterial stints placed in two of the grafts in an attempt to hold them open longer.  They failed to do the job that they were designed to do (at least not for a very long time frame) and I had to return to the hospital.  The doctors attempted to unclog the stints with a laser and that failed also.

Longer story shorter.......I was advised that I would have to undergo a second open heart surgery to re-graft the blockages.  That surgery was scheduled, completed and very successful at this time.  I have had to undergo three other heart catheterizations since then as a result of nuclear stress results but they found nothing wrong in the end.  My thinking is that what they saw in the stress test result were probably old scar tissue from previous damage.

Anyway, when I began to have all these problems in late '97, I began to get a little paranoid about too much physical work and started to lose interest in turning wrenches and all the other stuff that I would have to be doing with the old "A".  I talked with my brother Gary and he was very sympathetic to my fears and, since he had rebuilt plenty of the old beasts before, he didn't necessarily feel the urge that he just needed to do it again.  After all, he was primarily doing it for me in the first place.  After some more talk about the restoration, we decided to stop where we were at on the restoration and see if we could find someone interested in buying the tractor.

Gary has a lot of tractor people contacts and it didn't take long to find a buyer.  We sold the tractor and never completed the restoration project.  In retrospect, I have two major regrets.  (1) I should have made a commitment to the Fastrac readership to get to know the new owner and made trips to follow these updates to see what ended up with that 'ol A.  (2) That after making the decision to abort the project that it took several people e-mailing me to get me to tell you all why there were no more updates.  Just abruptly stopping the updates with no explanation was stupid and unfair to you all.

One thing I know is this:  My health may not be the same as it was but my interest has not stopped in old antique tractors!  I am now 63 years old and within a couple of years of retirement from my engineering job in the plastics extrusion business.  As some of you regular visitors may have noticed, we have changed our look and feel over the years and we will never stop with the Fastrac web site unless the old ticker finally gives out.  After retirement, I'll have a lot more time to sit on my butt and do more writing.  I still have big plans for Fastrac for the future but right now I have got to focus on what has been wrong with it.  One of the first fixes was to repair the damage I feel I have done to the readership by leaving this update open ended.

The second thing that has happened to Fastrac is that about a year ago (maybe longer), someone from a Southeast Asian country, I don't really know which one and it doesn't really matter, "hacked" into our cgi script on our server and began to spam junk entries into our Classified Ads.  I was getting about three hundred of these junk and phony ads each day.  That is why we went to a "Pay For Ad" system (to try and discourage spamming).  Didn't Work!  The ads became more prevalent than ever.  Finally my ISP contacted me and told me that they were shutting down our classified ad script because it was clogging up their servers.  That was a bummer but in all reality it wasn't doing anyone any good the way it was.  The Fastrac Classifieds have been shut down every since that time.  I have been looking at a lot of classified ad pieces of software to put back up on the web site {for well over a year now) and have finally located one that I like that has a strong enough firewall to prevent hacking from ever happening again.  By the way, this new system will allow the uploading of pictures and will be a Free based ad system one again.  Stay tuned, it may take a couple or three more weeks until it is up and running.  Hopefully you'll see it about the end of August '07.

I want to close this update by saying that I thank you all for reminding me that I should be more responsive to the needs of the loyal readers visiting the Fastrac Web site.  I can promise you that as long as I am feeling as good as I am right now, content will only get better and will not be open ended like I treated this A project.  Thanks for understanding and if you would like to e-mail me for any reason to talk about this or any other thing related to the site or old tractors, you can send it to: dave@adeptr.com.

Thanks for listening

Dave