Where Do I Begin?

It's been almost 6 years since I worked on this project last.  This is my old 1941 John Deere LA.  I bought it from a cousin in Central Indiana 7 years ago, and worked on it pretty good for the first year.  Things slowed down when Number 1 Kiddo popped out, but I continued to work on it slowly. 

Seven years ago, Dad and I hauled it home and it looked like this:

It's a small tractor.   Nearly the smallest of the small for that vintage.  If I remember correctly, it weighs in right around 2000 pounds, and generates a mere 14 horsepower as seen on the PTO.  Only 11 of those horses gets to the rear wheels.  (Keep in mind I just dropped in a new 23 horsepower engine on my lawnmower this past spring.)  The John Deere LA was intended for the "truck" farms - mostly vegetable and small produce farms.  There were only 60,000 or so made.  (Chime in if any of this is incorrect - this is all from memory)

So, all that is to say these LAs are kind of few and far between.  So imagine my surprise when we moved to our new house in 2007, and discovered my next door neighbor had an LA in a nicely restored condition.  Suffice it to say, we get along pretty good with our neighbors.

Since we moved over 5 years ago, I haven't worked on this tractor restoration project since.  I have stopped at this point:

And I have all these many parts to put back on:

It looks like a daunting task, but I hope I can keep up my motivation and get it done sometime this upcoming fall.  There's not too much to do:  mostly all body work on the sheet metal.  That's the hardest part of all these restorations - I dislike sheet metal.  But my job in academia is teaching me patience, so perhaps I need to try this again.