[AT] blowing the dust off

[jtchall at nc.rr.com]

Close to 25 years ago me and dad built a display trailer for grinding corn meal. We took a light duty 4 wheel wagon with no bed and locked up steering. A lot of torch work later we had the steering free so we set about building a bed for it. Made it completely out of wood we had on hand, floored with yellow pine. We had a 6 cylinder IH Silver Diamond power unit that came off a silage cutter. My family bought the engine in the early 70’s to power a grain dryer, which it did until the dryer burnt down about 1989-90. We had rebuilt the engine about 2-3 years prior. We put the engine on one front corner, set it an an angle to try to distribute the load over the bolster a little better. On the opposing back corner we put an IH grist meal (made by Meadows). The mill actually has pretty good original paint. We used the driveshaft out of the grain dryer (that was all there was salvageable) and a shaft from a woodsaw for power transmission. On the other front corner we bolted down my grandfathers IH one hole corn sheller. Now when we built this rig we would grind quite a bit of corn meal (one time we ground 300lbs) so we didn’t want to shell that much corn by hand—too much like work, this is a hobby remember! I got started in this antique collecting endeavor with 50’s model Briggs engines and old chainsaws. We took one of the Briggs engines that had been rebuilt and was an easy starter and hooked it to the sheller. Well now that we were all setup we ran this outfit for a couple years around Thanksgiving. Then it just got parked under a shed about 20 years ago, I think we ran it once maybe 10 years ago? Friday I pulled the Briggs engine off and carried it to the shop. Had to polish the magnets, coil and the points—after that it cranked on the first pull.Sat we decided to crank the IH power unit. My opinion is this thing needs a starter rebuild, its ALWAYS been hard to spin over since we had it. Not having a spare 6 volt (and I mean a big one at that), we had to do some improvising to crank it. We pulled one of the six volt Super A’s in front of the rig and ran a set of jumper cables to power the ignition. Then we pulled a truck up to power the starter—amazing how fast they spin when you shoot 12 volts to the starter. Spun it over a bit, no luck. Polished the points and it fired up like it was just ran last week. Ran the mill for a little bit, I only had wheat available to run through it. Everything worked well. I saved a few bags of ear corn last year, we’ll try to get it ran through in the next couple weeks and then put everything back into hibernation. Hope you guys got in some old iron time this weekend!

John Hall