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Members of Purdue's quarter-scale tractor pulling team (from left to right) include: James Bartlett, Greg Long, Keith Mears, Cody McKinley, Professor John Lumkes (adviser), Michael Holland, Brandon Manier, John Mahrenholz, Phil Wetzel, and Jose Garcia. Not pictured is Keith Harmeyer.

John Lumkes, the ag engineering professor who advises Purdue's quarter-scale tractor pulling team, may have some explaining to do. Nothing red flags a business office quite like a 2 a.m. receipt from Wal-Mart for six frying pans.

On June 1, ten Purdue engineering students — members of a team competing in the International Quarter-Scale Tractor Student Design Competition — thought they had put the finishing touches on their entry. They had just arrived at the annual four-day competition in St. Joseph, Mich., to compete with other college teams from the U.S. and Canada.

Built to one-fourth the size of a commercial tractor, each team's machine competes in a variety of categories, the most dynamic being the tractor pull. In this brute-strength competition, tractors pull a sledge as far as possible, and the sledge gets harder to pull the farther it travels.

But during the day-one safety inspections, Keith Harmeyer, a graduate student in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, and his teammates learned that they had misinterpreted a contest rule requiring exposed parts of the transmission to be covered with shielding. That was bad news for the students. Many had worked on the project for months and slept very little during the week in order to complete the tractor.

The odd shape of the three continuously variable transmission units, or CVTs, presented a problem: They couldn't use a typical flat shielding, and they didn't have tools to shape it. After all their work, it looked like they were stuck between a CVT and a flat piece.

"If anybody had said that they felt like packing up and going home, the rest of us probably would have agreed," Lumkes says.

Instead of fleeing, however, the team sat down in a circle on the grass and began brainstorming on what to use for shielding.

"There were all sorts of ideas. Somebody said, 'What about a dog's water bowl?'" Harmeyer recalls. "And then, somebody else said, 'Hey, what about a frying pan?' It sounded crazy at first, but then it seemed like it might just work."

The team went on an all-night scavenger hunt, desperately searching for a metal, bowl-shaped object, which the rules state has to be a quarter-inch thick. The team found six Teflon-coated frying pans — two for each transmission unit since the pans were only an eighth-inch thick — at the local Wal-Mart.

After sawing off the handles, they bolted the pans to the tractor and resubmitted it to the judges. "I remember the judges asking, 'Are those frying pans?'" Harmeyer says. "At that point, we were just happy we had found something that worked."

All the work and scavenging paid off when the ovenware-laden machine won one round of the tractor pull competition and placed fourth overall.

"When we placed first, the judges gave us a standing ovation," Harmeyer says. "It was great."

And if the business office raises questions about that 2 a.m. purchase, the team has their award to justify it.

Contact Lumkes at lumkes@purdue.edu