Every time Tim Mayberry gets out his crank and starts up the 80-year-old engine, people start making their way across the field to get a closer look.

“Is that a ‘one lunger’ or a ‘make and break’?” he is asked.

“It’s a one lunger,” Mayberry says with a smile.

Mayberry gets paid to help show off the old farm equipment at the Fryeburg Fair, but if the truth be known, he and others who take spectators back to farming in the early 1900s would probably do it for nothing.

Bruce Bowden from Orrington stopped by to say hello to Mayberry Monday morning and watch him crank-start an old Alamo gasoline engine powering a corn grinder.

“I don’t mean to sound sexist, but it’s mostly men who come to watch,” Bowden said. Bowden, a collector, is familiar with old farm equipment.

Mayberry, who lives in Sebago, said he learned about old machinery growing up on a farm in Naples.

Two 50-pound bags of dried corn kernels and a gallon of gas are Mayberry’s only supplies for running the corn grinder.

“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “You’ve got two steel burrs. One is stationary and the other one rotates, grinding up the corn. You put it through a screen, and use the fine corn meal to bake, and feed the husks to the animals.”

“How long does the gas last?” Mayberry was asked.

“I fill it in the morning, and it will last all day,” he said.

The five-cycle engine came from Joe Pierce’s dairy farm in West Baldwin, he said, where it was used in a pump house to pump water.

At some point, Pierce gave it to his neighbor across the road, Henry Black, who was also a dairy farmer. Black hooked the engine up to the corn grinder. In 1997 he gave it to the museum at the fairgrounds.

Ted Greene, who still lives in the house where his grandfather grew up in Sebago, comes to the fair every year to show how an old bolter mill works. A bolt is a short log that one person could handle – usually about four feet long. The mill shaves the bark off the sides, then slices it into boards.

Before he began cutting the log with the help of his son, Alan, he got out a can of belt dressing. With the belts moving, he sprinkled drops of what looked like heavy black tar onto each of them.

“When these old machines sit a long time, the belts dry out, so this helps,” he said. “By next Monday it will be running just great.”

The bolter mill, probably manufactured in the 1940s, is one of many made by the T.H. Ricker Co. in Harrison, Greene said. The company also produced planer mills, saw mills and shingle mills.

Dan Moore of Ludlow, Vt., showed spectators how an old hay bailer worked. After the hay is compressed into a block, a metal wire is put through a hole on one side, grabbed by someone on the other side, and wrapped around the bail to keep it together.

Some of the machines are owned by the museum, while others are privately owned.

Next to the corn grinder was an old gasoline-powered cultivator, which, like the corn grinder, is a four-cylinder engine started by a crank.

Mayberry said the cultivator was from the 1910 era.

“It was one step ahead of a hoe,” he said.

Demonstrations will continue throughout the week until the fair ends on Sunday.