ABERDEEN, Sask. – Most people think of research and development departments as the domain of university-trained engineers, chemists and marketing grads.
But for 30 years it was also where Bill Newton plied his trade – with only a Grade 7 education.
For Newton, now 62, working in the world of research and patents was miles away from the Aberdeen farm where he grew up.
He even got his name on a patent with three other people for Flexi-coil’s first automatic fold harrow packer bar.
He started working for the Saskatoon farm equipment manufacturer, which has since been taken over by Case New Holland, in 1967 as a welder.
Read Also
Final crop reports show strong yields, quality
Crops yielded above average across the Prairies this year, and quality is generally average to above-average.
But that changed two years later.
“They found out I could do a lot of funny things.”
Those were the mechanical creations Newton had been building on his parents’ farm since he was a kid.
He built his first masterpiece when he was 14 by mounting two transmissions back to back in a 1928 Chevy chassis. The idea was to build a vehicle that could be used to clean the barn, but which could move slower than a conventional tractor and still keep the revs up.
However, with no doors or roof and only a windshield and two bench seats, it was also a lot of fun. Too much fun, actually.
“The neighbors just hated to see me with that thing,” he said.
“It was wild. We were forbid to go onto one neighbour’s yard.”
The contraption was popular with the neighbour kids and their parents feared for their safety.
“It stayed around a couple of years,” he said.
“It got used up for something else.”
Newton had learned how to weld by the time he was 14, but took formal classes at the local high school when he was 16, a year after he quit regular school. That’s when his world really changed.
“When I got the welder, that’s when things started happening.”
He eventually stole the motor out of his double-tranny car and attached it to the welder so he didn’t have to run it off the tractor. Then, Newton grew more ambitious.
Shortly after he quit school his father found him something to do.
The family, along with the several neighbours, belonged to a snowplow club, which jointly owned a plow to clear the area’s roads.
Newton worked as plow driver, but hated how the snow piled up alongside the v-shaped plow. He wanted a snowblower, but there was no money for one. So he built it, mainly out of a scrap combine he bought and with $70 given to him by an uncle for welding supplies.
At the same time, he also built a power toboggan, the precursor to the modern snowmobile.
He spent a couple of years playing with a few ideas – running wheels inside a car tire, and driving two combine augers with a motor – before coming up with a version that used a nine horsepower auger engine and could go 20 km-h.
Like his other creations, the power toboggan was built out of junk. The drive sprockets came from an old Bombardier that a Saskatoon radio station had used to check its towers. Newton found it in a scrap pile in Saskatoon.
He came by his abilities and his love of junk honestly.
His father did blacksmithing for the neighbours and his grandfather had “a beautiful junkpile.”
“It seemed like when we were kids there were acres of stuff there.”
At Flexi-coil, Newton was able to use his skills for more commercial ends. The job took him to Australia once and many times to the United States.
His lack of education was never a major problem.
“The practical parts I had no problem with, but when it came down to the math and stuff like that, that’s what I had trouble with and wish I’d done more schooling. But it’s too late now.”
He did get more schooling in the 1970s, studying basic machining at the provincial technical institute and getting his metallurgy for welding foreman’s certificate from the University of Saskatchewan.
In his spare time, he built a water wall for the Aberdeen volunteer fire department. The device, which sprays a wall of water to protect a building from a nearby fire, has been used three times.
He built it because the department couldn’t afford to buy one. It still has it.
He had hoped to find time to relax in his retirement and even bought a trailer so he and his wife, Sharon, could travel.
But so far the trailer sits in the yard like a hopeful promise yet unfulfilled.
Newton stills grow crops on 1,300 acres with his brother and has added a few “ornaments” to the farm – bison and a half acre of willow herb.
There’s also the seed cleaning plant to run, which he took a winter off to build in 1980-81.
At the moment he’s building tire stands for his son’s tire store in Saskatoon.
He is also a grain pump inspector for Louis Dreyfus, a job he says he built himself after building a reducer for the company that could slow grain pumps down for easier inspection.
He spends every other week on the road inspecting grain pumps at six grain terminals in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
His latest triumph was to figure out how to install a video camera in the grain pump so that he could see what was happening inside.
“I still do some funny things.”
