Story by Ross MacKay Photo by Richard Dimmock
With Land Rover one of the featured marques this year, 4WD owners from all over Southland made a bee-line for the Edendale Vintage Machinery Club’s 32nd annual Crank Up event over the January 26-27 weekend.
History – literally – comes to life at the Crank Up, with this year’s event marking 100 years of Citroen cars, 80 years of David Brown tractors, 70 years of Land Rovers (in a nod to the company’s own anniversary celebrations throughout 2018), and over 50 since Southland local George Begg built his first racing car.
As I said in our report on this iconic event in last years’ April mag the event doesn’t so much celebrate ‘History’ with capital H, rather it is history writ small, and proudly colloquial, with the focus unashamedly on the machines and machinery that helped make New Zealand great.
Over the years the event had also attracted groups which like to ‘re-live,’ or ‘bring history back to life. This large and ever-evolving group now includes shearers who specialise in blade shearing, WW1 & 2 re-enactors and a growing group of Steampunk ‘dandies’ from the Southern Society of Steampunk Steamologists
The traction engines on which the Crank Up event was originally based, still play a key part. But now the celebration of all things mechanical includes everything from stationary engines to tractors, trucks and yes even (racing) lawn mowers.
This year’s invited MC was former magazine editor and radio talk show host Alan Dick who now lives ‘just up the road’ in Oamaru. He had his work cut out too, with more than 6500 people attending the event across the two days.
Actually it was more like two-and-a-half days because the long southern twilight allowed the organisers to kick it off with a free rolling drive-by of road-legal exhibits through Edendale on the Friday evening before.
Edendale Vintage Machinery Club president Ken Bell told Gore’s The Ensign newspaper that he was again ‘delighted’ with the way this year’s event panned out.
“It went really, really well, We had great numbers both days for it and the weather forecast was good for us.”
Planning has already begun for the 33rd event in January 2020 with the feature categories being European tractors up to 1980 and Japanese cars up to 1990.
To read the full story in the April 2019 issue of NZ4WD go to Zinio.com (March 15) or purchase your own hard copy at the Adrenalin store
