My brother Bill Rockefeller originally got me interested in tractor pulling. He had pulled Super Stocks for 16 years before I started in 1986. This picture of him & his JD 4010 SS is from a news paper article in 1976.
Another picture of my brother Bill Rockefeller from the 1970 era.
This is my first tractor.
The year was 1986. It was a single Allison with turbo chargers and Hilborn fuel injection. 4 plate 12.5' Crower Glide clutch, Kippley Transmission (which I still have in my tractor today), Rockwell rear end and Michigan planetary. The wheels were made by Doug Drussel as the waist gates also were. 
This picture was taken in 1988 in Illinois after I rebuilt my original tractor. I spent 3 weeks pulling in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa on my way out to visit Wayne Longnecker. I had picked up sponsor ship from Hawk Frame & Axle and they had painted the new frame rails and fenders. While at Wayne Longneckers I added MSD ignition to the motor.
This is a picture of the twin allison Policy Peddler the first time it was rolled out of the shop!
This is a picture taken at Louisville. in 1991. I finished 4th, 3rd & 2nd at Louisville with that tractor. I also went to Bowling Green and finished near the top. From 1987 with the single Allison through about 1995 I traveled all over the country Pulling indoors during the winter with TNT, USHRA & NTPA. That was a lot of fun. I got to meet a lot of very nice pullers. We pulled at Daytona Beach, Rosemont in Chicago, Capital Center out side of Washington DC, New York City, Toronto in the Sky Dome and others.
In the Sky Dome they had 2 pulling tracks, 2 mud racing tracks to run side by side races, plus a "thrill track" down the center where they were jumping a car off of a ramp smashing it into 6 or 8 cars piled on top of one another.
This picture is of the Policy Peddler with a blown Donovan Chevy in place of the second Allison. Approximately 1991 New York/NTPA voted in the 3 engine rule. At that time the rule was interpreted that the 2 Allison's on Alcohol and 8.1 super chargers could not use injection and had to use carburetors. The first year the rule might have been we had to run gas I do not remember for sure. I knew I did not want to run the alcohol through the super chargers. I had seen enough of the broken super charger housings from back firing so I added the Chevy. The Allison turned between 4-4500 rpm's and the Chevy approximately 6000 rpm's. The Chevy was built along the same lines as the Allison. It had a 4.75" crank so it had a lot of low end torque and did not want to turn a lot of rpm's.
This was Louisville in 1996. Well Ralph Banter was correct. I had changed over to Chevy's. I had designed a frame over the previous year then had John Birosh build the new frame from Chrome molly tubing. John was building DIRT stock cars at the time. I had a hard time convincing him to build the frame. He was afraid that it would offend the stock car guys that he was working on my tractor and not their stock cars. The frame turned out beautiful. John went on to be crew chief on a NASCAR Bush Team for a couple years and is now building "show car street rods". I at this time had 2 Rodecks and 1 Donovan. The Rodecks were built with used Crower Billet cranks and pistons. There were new rods in the motor. There was something there that the motors did not like. One motor ran for about 15 runs before it threw a rod out of both sides of the block. About a year later the other motor did the same. It happened at night neither time did I know anything happened and I went on down the track. The motors set there and idled after the run with no rods on one of the crank throws. That was the only mechanical problem I have had with the Chevy's since building the tractor.
When I switched to Chevy's I had used a Engler gear box. Specifically I had purchased the one from Fred Freeman's Mean Mistreater, which Kenny Angel had purchased. Toward the end of the first year the gears had broken so I had the box re-build. The next year I won the points race her in NY with ESP. That winter I was re-building the tractor getting ready for Louisville. A couple weeks before going I had the gear box out and decided to have the gears magna-fluxed "just in case" even though I knew the gears were only a year old. There were several cracked teeth. I was not sure why I continued to have a problem with "that" gear box, I knew I did not want it to continue so I called SCS and Mike Sage built the current gear box I have with the engines facing forward
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