NOT even a near-fatal illness could keep Hume Colville from repairing the engine of his dreams, writes JOHANNA LEGGATT
Hume Colville was supposed to die from the meningoencephalitis that he contracted last year, but the restorer and inventor had other plans.
Doctors at Bendigo Hospital were stunned when he fought off the virus, which causes acute swelling of the brain, but Hume had a 12-tonne Hornsby suction gas-powered engine to restore.
His old friend and fellow enthusiast, Lindsay Schulz, spoke to Hume over the phone from hospital and found him in a typically resilient mood.
"I told him, 'Hume, you had better not go dying on me because no one else knows how to restore that thing," said Lindsay. "He said, 'I am not going to die. I will finish this engine first'."
When Hume pulled through, doctors told him he would be in hospital for nine months, but he was discharged in nine days.
He had a month's worth of rehabilitation before setting to work on the engine.
"I had to learn how to do basic things again.
"I couldn't remember who my wife was and my reflexes were completely lost," he said.
"But as soon as I was fit enough I was in that backyard working on the engine. And if I had not have gotten sick, I would have finished it within a few months."
(It was not the first time Hume had narrowly cheated death - about 50 years ago a tree fell on him and he was paralysed for several months.)
Hume needed to apply all of his engineering skills and ingenuity to extract the engine from the McDonald family farm at Cobramunga Station, in southern NSW.
The engine was shipped out from the UK in 1912 and used on one of the earliest irrigation systems on the Murray, often causing the river to run dry.
"It ran until 1951, and after that it was basically just left outside, so it has been in all kinds of weather and had pretty much rusted out," Hume said.
The McDonald family offered the engine to Hume when they sold the property recently, telling him that if he could move the engine it was his to restore.
"The family thought it would take about five years to restore and were surprised when it took around 12 months," he said.
Three semi-trailers and a 40-tonne crane were marshalled to help transport the engine back to Hume's Barham workshop.
"We pulled up at 9am and by 1pm we were out of there. The load weighed 60 tonnes all up," Hume said.
Lindsay helped raise money for the restoration, with the aim of exhibiting the restored irrigation system as a museum piece at nearby Benjeroop Hall.
Some of the work was outsourced - Hume took the cylinder head to Swan Hill Engineering because the valves had been eaten away - but the nuts-and-bolts restoration work fell to him.
And chief among the near-impossible tasks was moving the piston that had rusted into the cylinder after many years outdoors.
"It could not be moved for the life of me so I got a battering ram, which weighed around 150kg, hung it on a chain and banged it into the cylinder," he said.
"It moved around one-thousandth of an inch the first time I did it, so I kept going until it finally shifted."
The water jacket was also full of mud, which Hume had to drill out. "It was like a brick, it had set so hard," he said.
While the restoration was one of Hume's most challenging works, it has not been his only success story.
He has also designed his own mortiser, which is used to put holes in fence posts, and often takes orders from local sawmills.
Hume has also built a boomsaw mounted on a tractor for cutting logs and is working on patenting a device that emits a noise to scare birds away from fruit trees.
His range of projects is impressive, especially considering he is mostly self-taught.
"All of my skills come from experience, from watching my father," he said.
"During World War II we had a traction engine that did the work for us before we bought a tractor, and I learned a lot that way."
Meanwhile, Hume and Lindsay are hoping the newly restored engine will be in the Benjeroop Hall by March.
"It will be surrounded by glass and the pump will be operating in a big water container," Hume said. "It will be quite spectacular."
