Crystal Swing's Derek Burke shares his passion for restoring vintage Ford tractors

When he isn’t hucklebucking his way across Ireland on tour with mother Mary and sister Dervla, Derek Burke of the popular family band Crystal Swing likes to spend his time restoring vintage Ford tractors.

The singer’s passion for the vehicles is as strong as his passion for music.

Indeed, his fiancée, Claire McAuliffe, admits she has to share the love of her life with the agricultural vehicles.

“My mom always says that Derek is just like my dad, that’s why I’m with him,” says Claire. “They are both obsessed with tractors!”

When Derek, 24, calls to Claire’s home, he admits: “Usually when I walk in, I come and I say hello and then it’s straight on to the important topic of tractors.

“My dream tractor would be something like a Ford TW-35, that would just be king of all tractors,” enthuses Derek, from Lisgoold in East Cork.

“A normal vintage tractor is maybe about 50 or 60 horsepower. This tractor would be 170 or 180. They’re just a huge animal of a tractor.”

Such is Derek’s knowledge of Ford tractors, that they were his specialist subject when he appeared on a Celebrity Mastermind show on TV3 in 2012.

The fact he didn’t perform as well as he hoped in raising €500 for multiple sclerosis causes was more a reflection of the extreme difficulty of the questions than on Derek — give the ten in the panel on the right a try and see for yourself!

If you do better than Derek’s tally of three, award yourself a pat on the back.

Derek said of the nerve-wracking appearance: “I’m used to being up on stage with a microphone. It was a daunting situation in that chair, answering questions.” However, the good sport added: “I’d do it again in the morning!”

Derek, whose band Crystal Swing shot to fame in 2010 when their version of the song She Drinks Tequila went viral, said the first tractor he bought was a Ford 4000, a model which was built in the US between 1965 and 1967.

“That was running pretty well engine-wise, the paint work and all that was kind of done, but I had to rewire it,” he says, adding that he had to put a new drawbar and hitch in the vehicle as well.

“I had a small bit of work to do to it but not a major amount. I’ve worked on different ones and that with friends of mine but they would be my favourite tractor. They would be the simplest and the most common, in Cork anyway!

“The tractors I like now would have been the ones that were made in the 1970s and the 1980s and that’s when I suppose Ford really came good because they made the 1000 series tractors. When they came on the market, they were like no other tractor.

“First of all, I suppose they only had what’s called a three cylinder engine, but they were a far better tractor of their kind than any of their competitors, nobody else could get the power out of a three cylinder engine than what Ford could.”

Derek says modern tractors are much harder to fix and re-build as the technology is so advanced.

“Nowadays, any tractor that’s in a field, if it breaks down, it can’t be fixed. It’s going to either need a mechanic or a lad to come out with a computer to fix it because you just can’t do anything yourself really with them.

“Maybe if the tractor kept on revving out, you could disconnect the pedal on the ground and use a handle instead, or if you couldn’t turn off your tractor you could just go to the outside of it and pull the stopper manually.

“If you wanted to start the tractor if the key switch wasn’t working, you could put a screwdriver up on top of the motor and start it with that.

“With old tractors, no matter what happened, you could fix them on the side of the road, so you’d always get home. There was no fear of being stopped.”