[AT] Oil dry / Rural King / And even more O.T. stuff

Sat Feb 28 11:54:28 PST 2015

People tend to remember us old "eccentrics" Herb.
:-)
I forgot (what, me forget?) to mention that the corn sheller I was talking
about above was a Minneapolis Moline too. We still have it. Son Scott
bought it at auction quite a few years ago. I am always amazed when I open
the top lids just how much it is like a more modern axial flow combine
inside. Large cylinder with length-wise flow. Those MM shellers were
considered the best in the 1950's here. Very popular, I still see them in
fence lines. Ours stays inside. I can remember them sat up at barn cribs
with long ear corn drag feeds up to about 30 feet long in sections.
I remember hauling to a local mill at about the end of ear corn days and
the mill's old sheller inside under the dump drive had just frazzeled its
last parts. The mill owner had then bought an old chopped off school bus
with a quite large MM sheller mounted on it with a big power unit. It had
belonged to a guy that did custom shelling at the customer's farm. I had to
pull the wagons to where he had it sitting and unload into its corn drag.
He never hauled the cobs from it. He just moved the bus a little ways and
sat the cob stack on fire. That sheller was so big and so well powered I
was never in any danger of over-feeding it.
:-)
Dang I wish I had just a tiny amount or those cobs that were wasted to
apply to my farm today... We would never need fertilizer...

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 1:54 PM, Herb Metz <metz-h.b at comcast.net> wrote:

> John,
> We had a bachelor neighbor (Casey Meggar{sp}) who owned and operated a
> steam
> engine and a threshing machine.  His life was there in a big metal shed
> with
> concrete floor with his shop, a couple steam engines, half dozen old, never
> used, cars (1920's, Star, three seat National {driver seat up front and two
> sat in back, just two doors but the lack of passengers seat up front made
> it
> easy to enter/exit}, etc); his heat was large logs in an old steam engine
> firebox, he slept on a cot somewhere back in the corner, couple cats around
> to handle the little critter problem.  His folks lived approx 500' away in
> a
> very nice home.  He always had several dozen calves in his feedlot; hay was
> the only crop because the ground was flat but not tillable (hardpan?).  Dad
> would stop in several times each year; I was all eyes and ears.  Couple
> times, mid 40's, Casey entered the local town after harvest parade, had a
> good looking team pulling a nice farm wagon with couple hay bales, etc. and
> his farm clothes on, and signs on the wagon "40 cents for eggs, 70 cents
> for
> meat, how in the h*** can a poor fellow eat".  Casey toured the
> neighborhood
> doing after harvest threshing of loose/bundled wheat/oat straw.  Approx
> 1946, Dad and I swapped help with several neighbors a couple summers.  The
> first day I pulled a wagon alongside the extra long conveyor Casey had
> attached to the threshing machine, then started tossing bundles onto this
> conveyor. We used four tine regular pitchforks with considerable curvature
> of each tine, whereas a tine fork is two or three tines with reduced
> curvature of each tine.  A neighbor Dads age was pitching bundles off
> another wagon on other side of the conveyor. I pitched several bundles onto
> the conveyor, great. Then about the sixth bundle I piptched onto the
> conveyor took the fork out of my hands; there was the bundle on the
> conveyor
> going up toward the threshing machine, with my pitchfork still in the
> bundle.  Before I could even think of what to do, the experienced guy
> across
> from me stepped toward the conveyor and extended his pitchfork to retrieve
> my pitchfork from that bundle.  I could breath again.  I will never forget
> that.  Looking back, he was probably expecting something like this might
> happen.   After that I did not sink the pitchfork into the bundles any
> further than necessary, and gripped the fork more firmly when releasing the
> pitched bundle.  Foreign metal, etc was a nightmare for the threshing
> machines metal teeth that shredded the straw and the wheat/oat kernel from
> its hull. There were several other threshing machines in our area (central
> KS), but the closest was fifteen miles away. Tell your Dad that 1930 was a
> good year.  Herb(GA)
>
>
> -Original Message-----
> From: jtchall at nc.rr.com
> Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2015 7:02 AM
> To: Antique tractor email discussion group
> Subject: Re: [AT] Oil dry / Rural King / And even more O.T. stuff
>
> I also observed many folks had a much more keen interest in watching saws
> run compared to other equipment we were demonstrating.  Some because they
> were just so darn loud, but most because sawing wood was something they
> could relate to. About even in interest was running a stationary baler,
> there's tons of non-farm guys that helped load hay at some point in time
> and
> can therefore relate.
> Threshers, silage cutters, grist mills, corn shredders---the pool of
> interested folks grows much smaller. Partly because they have NO idea what
> they are looking at and still don't even when you try to explain it. The
> other reason, there just aren't many folks alive that ever saw this stuff
> used when it was new. At 84 years old, my dad never helped run a thresher
> until he was about 65. He saw a few folks do it when he was young. His dad
> replaced a wooden hand fed Geiser thresherwith a Massey pull type combine
> right around the start of WWII.
>
> I will say it is easy to spot a good Southern cook, she's the lady who
> inspects the final product coming out of a grist mill and gives you her
> $.02
> as to the quality of the grits or corn meal you are grinding.
>
> John
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Rotigel
> Sent: Friday, February 27, 2015 9:14 PM
> To: Antique tractor email discussion group
> Subject: Re: [AT] Oil dry / Rural King / And even more O.T. stuff
>
> Hi John,
> The 16' live oak log was about 24 inches at the butt when I started on Wed.
> I'm down to about 7' now and my guess on the dia. now is about 20". That
> live oak is the hardest "stuff" I've ever cut. It takes about 18 minutes to
> make one cut. I go through a poplar log of that size in about 7 minutes at
> home in PA. On the other hand, 18 minutes is about the time it takes to
> down
> a 16 oz Old Mil, so it's not all bad!
> Dave
> PS, Like you, I find that everything I cut is hauled away. (Tables, Clocks,
> Cutting Boards or whatever.) I had one woman ask me if I could speed up the
> saw because she didn't have the time to wait around. I smiled and asked her
> if she would like a cup of coffee. I think she must have been from Naples!
>
> On Feb 27, 2015, at 8:34 PM, jtchall at nc.rr.com wrote:
>
> > Running your drag saw I assume? How big of a log were you cutting? Years
> > ago
> > when my dad was able, we used to demonstrate our 2 man chainsaws. A nice
> > 24-30" Poplar log made for one heck of a display. A lot of folks wanted
> > those cuts for crafts. One fellow in particular was going to make clocks
> > out
> > of them.
> >
> > John Hall
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Dave Rotigel
> > Sent: Friday, February 27, 2015 7:59 PM
> > To: Antique tractor email discussion group
> > Subject: Re: [AT] Oil dry / Rural King / And even more O.T. stuff
> >
> > I have been at the Zolfo show (FL) for three days now cutting up a 18'
> log
> > into 2" pieces. Lots of sawdust there for anyone who wants to use it for
> > "oil dry"!
> > Dave
> > PS, GREAT Show and ONLY a little rain!
> >
> >
>
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-- 
-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com