Hauraki dairy family keeps farm thriving while growing vintage machinery collection
Vintage machinery enthusiast Keith Barriball. Photo / Catherine Fry
Keeping the family farm in the family has proved a winning formula for Keith Barriball, allowing him and his wife, Peggy, to stay on the land they love while supporting both a working dairy operation and a growing vintage machinery collection.
The couple’s son, Warren, now runs the dairy farm they purchased in 1989, while Keith and daughter Wanda manage calves, yearlings and heifers across the run-off and lease blocks.
Peggy keeps the business on track behind the scenes, handling the accounts.
Alongside the day-to-day operations, Keith has built a long-standing reputation in the vintage machinery community.
He was the inaugural president of the Hauraki Vintage Machinery Club in 1998 and remains an active member today.
He has been collecting for a while but didn’t consider it “collecting” at the time.
“Sometimes with tractors, it’s harder to change the implements than it is to do the actual job you’re trying to do.
“It’s easier to buy a tractor for each implement and keep it attached.
“I bought quite a few secondhand tractors for that purpose … and I still have them all, so I suppose that’s collecting," he said with a smile.
As time has passed, Keith has added several stationary engines to his collection and has restored some of them with his diesel mate, Graham Ware.
“I’ve got an early 1900s, English-made Ruston diesel stationary engine.
“In the late 1990s, it was sitting in a paddock at fellow Hauraki Vintage Machinery Club member Neil Fitzgerald’s paddock, and I acquired it.”
The Ruston
The Ruston came from the Mercer Quarry and needed to be taken apart and rebuilt using a mixture of new and original parts.
“We used new rings, bearings and valves alongside old bits.”
The one-cylinder engine is all cast iron apart from the pipes and tanks.
The engine has a water tank to feed the heat-exchange cooling system.
It has flywheels on either side and fabric belts, although leather was sometimes used in the old days.
“It produces 3.5 hp with heaps of torque and would have been used to power milking machines, shearing plants and water pumps before electricity.”
It has a crank start, which Keith said was much easier when he was younger, and now uses Neil Dalgety’s starting motor to start all his stationary engines.
The machine is very heavy and is loaded onto the ute using a front loader on the tractor to go to the crank-up days.
“The stationary engines always promote conversation when they are on display, and I enjoy talking about them with younger generations.”