You need to be a little bit nuts

A sense of nostalgia and an addiction to tinkering is common among the membership of the Waikato Vintage Tractor and Machinery Club.

Club president Ron Tuck describes its 200 members as "a bit nuts".

"I guess it's part of their younger days, plus they enjoy working with old machinery."

The membership includes men and women aged 18 to 80, but for the most part it is 40-plus males with a love of tractors from a pre-computer age.

"That's one of the beauties about them," he says. "Anyone with half an ounce of sense can pull them apart and put them together."

Tuck says most of New Zealand's tractors came from the US and Britain, with John Deere, Farmall, Ferguson and Nuffield among the most common.

He says the machines hark back to an era when tractors could be "imported in a box and you put them together over here".

Every good tractor came with an equally good handbook "and provided you could read, you could fix them".

Collectable tractors commonly date back to the 1920s, although last year marked the centenary of the arrival of the first tractor to New Zealand's shores.

Tuck says a tractor has to be at least 30 years old to be classified as an antique.

Restoring an old workhorse to its former glory, he says, can be a labour of love. The duration of renovation often "depends on his enthusiasm and his bank account".

The effort, however, can be worthwhile. A tidy runner with only several generations of owner can fetch $20,000.