Machinery Donations to Tractor Clubs

I would be interested to hear from or talk to anyone who belongs to a tractor club about your rules for donations. The club I belong to (Antique Engine and Tractor Association)needs to come up with some rules or guidelines for donated items. We do not want to end up being a scrap yard for useless items donated to the club with restrictions on them.( I'll donate this to the club in memory of my Dad, but you can't get rid of it). Also don't want to end up with several of the same items( What do you do with 10 broken hand corn shellers or whatever). Or the famous, I want to donate this to the club for display at your show, and you keep it inside but we still own it.( can you say free storage?)
Just wondering how other clubs handle this. There are some scarse items that would be great to have, others that fall into the who cares catagory. Don't want to get into the; Well, you took his steam engine, but you won't take my rusted out pull combine that comes in a pile situation. Just wondering how others handle this. E-mail is open. Check out the club at www.ae-ta.com
Chris

I would say a tractor club should designate a curator much like a museum.

I was a director of a threshing show for 23 years and this was a constant problem and still is.

Someone's grandpa's treasured baler is just too good to scrap so they're donating it to the show. The flywheel, plunger and knotter are missing, but but surely there's someone at the show who can fix it up! True story that I was stuck in the middle of! A board mdmber who was higher up on the ladder said yes, and I was the one who had to unload it.

If the donator is some unknown person to the show it's not too hard to say no but when it's a longtime member/contributor, or if it's the relative of a show director, or the show's banker, who wants to donate a pile of junk it's becomes a real tough PR situation.

Here's the rules I proposed to the board after the baler incident.

1. The machine has to be ready to run and operate without any restoration of any sort.

2. The show has the right to sell the machine at any time. We need money more than we need more machinery to store.

3. Board representatives will examine the machine before it leaves home, and report to the rest of the board.

4. Being a non-profit show, the directors will determine the machine value for tax purposes, not the machine's owner, IF the machine is accepted. (this one can cause some trouble)

Enforcing these rules is very tough. If a couple of directors on the board don't mind collecting junk on the show grounds it can lead to strained relationships. Maybe the machine is in excellent shape but there's no one to operate it at the show, or maybe it's repetition. Then it's drug in and out of the storage building every year, and it eventually deteriorates.

Good luck and I hope you have directors that all think alike. Jim

Northern Michigan Flywheelers has some items that have been donated. The club OWENS the items. The club can do with them as they see fit. This includes the 1952 MM ZA I gave to the club whitch they put a plaque on that it is in memorey of my late wife Fran. Someeone dropped off an old piece of junk sprayer whitch they gave to me as I wanted the frame and wheels to make a maple sap collector. Built a cedar tank, fiberglassed the inside, put a drain in the bottom and grandson now uses it. The Fairbanks Morse platform scales given to the club are used to weigh tractors for the pulls.
John

AMEN TO WHAT JIM SAID

I was on the same board for 6 years and have been involved in that show for about 30 years.

It is too bad that some of the machinery got accepted.

A threshing show is not a good owner of equipment esp if it isn't ready to go to work. Same show had a pretty rare piece that got moved in and out year after year till finally it started living outside. Getting worse and worse year after year. I had a guy lined up who was interested in it after I was on the board. (through this site oddly enough) One board member vetoed the sale of said piece and till his passing that is the way it stayed.

What I am saying is unless you can put the piece of equipment to work in putting on the show don't accept it. It becomes a albatross. Needs to be moved twice a year to mow etc.

BTDT

jt

You might end some of the problem by selling raffle tickets for the donated equipmnet at your local shows everyone wants something for $1 dollar tickets even though they don"t even know what it is.:->

We are a IHCC State Chapter. We have a Donation agreement that is signed by our O&Ds and the donor if we accept the donation. It basically says, we now own the donation and state we will preserve, restore, maintain, use and exhibit it as the Board of Directors deem appropriate. We further state that if & when the donation becomes inappropriate, due to poor physical shape, maintainability, lack of storage space, or no longer arouses public interest,or any other reason approved by the Board, then we shall dispose of it . The donation is described and signed .
May sound a little brusqe, but as youall know, future Directors and Officers can't be expected to be held to something that seemed like a good thing years before, or have to deal with unreasonable heirs sometime down the road.

I have to agree with TWheat. The museum where I work took all kinds of crap in when they first started because we had nothing. We were the dumping ground for anything and everything. Now that we have been around for 12 years things have changed. Originally we had made handshake agreements (another gigantic problem) with owners to store their things on our site so we would have something to show. Now as we grow and are running out of room we are having a tough time getting them to take it back (because they don't want to have to store it when we have been doing it). We recently enacted a new policy. Anything on loan must have a written agreement. That agreement has to be redone every 5 years. If the owner can't be found/contacted after good faith effort the equipment becomes the property of the museum and we can do with it as we see fit. We are also trying to convince the owners of the certain items that they will never take them home and thus they should donate the item to us, take the tax deduction and it will be noted on the plaque that it was donated by them. It is still hard to get them to do it.

In terms of donations the form that the donor signs states we have the right to do anything we want with it. If there are strings attached, then we normally turn it down because strings just get into knots and we don't want/need that. We do make 1 exception. If somebody insists on giving it to us and expects it to be restored, then we are willing to restore it if they pay for it. So far for the two we have done this way it has worked out quite well.

However, even though we have that policy we still have foundation (they are the ones that sponsor events for the museum since the museum is actually owned by the city I live in) members that take all kinds of crap. When that happens we stick it out back in a pile and when scrap comes back up we are going to cash in.

I guess it is all part of being part of a museum and taking donations. I am sure we have all donated something that doesn't work/doesn't work right to get rid of it because it is "just too good to throw away". I know I am guilty of it.

Ask the Bos, who cares what anyone else has to say.