[AT] Plowing

rlgoss at twc.com rlgoss at twc.com
Mon Jun 29 13:17:37 PDT 2015


Safety ideas of that nature were natural carry-overs from the days of horse-drawn farm implements.  You never buckled the reins together and put them over your head or around your body for fear of the complications if the traces break or become unhitched.  And then there was our neighbor, Georg Gillef -- he was in immigrant farmer (and brewmeister) from Macedonia.  His normal working position with his horses was with buckled reins around his body.  That left him able to put both hands on the plow.  The team only needed voice commands unless they were turning around at the end of the field.  We shared a number of farm implements with Georg, and left the tongues long so he could use his horses while we used our John Deere on the same equipment.  We bought an old side-delivery rake at auction and fixed it up so it was usable.  George borrowed it and pulled it a couple miles down the road to rake the second cutting of alfalfa. In the middle of the raking process, one of the large front wheels fell off.  Georg had been asleep, and when he woke, thought he had hit a dead furrow.  The team pulled on, finally got tired of the extra load, and after dragging the rake a full 30 or 40 yards, they stopped.  Georg was at a loss to tell us what happened.  After all, he had been asleep!


Larry
---- Greg Hass <ghass at m3isp.com> wrote: 
> Those old timers that built those old tractors were pretty smart and 
> designed some pretty good things. Growing up we used a IH Super C for a 
> lot of things including some with trip ropes. My dad used the bent wire 
> trick on our equipment,however it hooked to a special place on the seat. 
> It was a short piece of spring steel about 1/16 of an inch thick with a 
> 3/4 inch hole and was standard from the factory. The edges of the hole 
> were quite sharp. In later years I asked my dad why it was built like 
> that. He said that it was so if you actually put the rope through the 
> hole and tied a knot in it and the implement unhooked the rope would be 
> cut off instead of possibly giving the operator a big enough jolt to 
> knock him off the seat. A pretty smart idea I think.
>        Greg Hass
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