Now & Then : Moving parts on wheat binder fascinating for boy
Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/tnebc/Community/4747/
“ Following the Old Binder ”
I have a certain love of old farm machines, especially those having many moving parts in sight. This sometimes leads us to old machinery get-togethers such as the Old Thresher’s Reunion in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. These old machines, threshers, steam tractors and antique gas tractors can put on quite a dramatic show, as their operators put them to work.
My fascination with old machinery began as a small boy. From my earliest memory on the farm, we had an old grain binder sitting unused along the fence across the creek from the house. I think Dad had used it until about 1940, and its canvas rolls were preserved in our attic for years; but the old binder was considered worn out.
When I was about 5 years old, Dad hired a man with a good working binder to come harvest our crop of oats. When he brought his binder in by the road, it was being pulled by a team of horses, but in a sideways direction. The road wheels were metal wheels about 18 inches high, and I think they could be raised and lowered. You lowered them to “ road ” the binder, but to run the machine in the field, you lifted the road wheels out of the way, leaving the machine’s weight on the large “ drive wheel. ” The tongue for the horses was moved around to the front, and when the three-horse team was hitched, the machine was ready to cut and bind bundles of oats.
Being a little kid, my job was mainly to stay out of the way. But I wanted to see what was going on, so I followed the binder around and around the field, watching first this working part, then that. At first my attention was on the cutting and catching operations. The cutter was a reciprocating sickle much like that of a hay mower. Above the sickle bar was a large revolving reel that helped lay the standing grain evenly into the cutter and onto the platform. The platform had a rolling canvas, basically a large wide belt, which carried the grain over to the bundling section of the machine. There an inclined double set of canvasses grasped the grain and carried it upward to the machine’s top center. From that point the grain slid into the bundler, where the bundle was shaped. When the bundle was up to size, the tying mechanism tripped, and a strand of “ binder twine ” was wrapped around the bundle and firmly tied. The bundle was then levered out into the catcher where several bundles were collected. When enough bundles were collected to form a “ shock, ” the bunch was dumped as a stack, ready for the men to come by setting up the “ shocks ” of oats. A shock is a stack in which several bundles are set upright together, then two or three bundles were placed over the top. That helped the shock shed any falling rain. The shocks were left in the field to dry, then were threshed or ground.
On an old grain binder, everywhere you looked, parts were busy — the pitman arm driving the sickle, the canvas belts carrying the grain, the chains and sprockets, the packing teeth, the knotter, the twine feed and the arm that swung around to pitch out each bundle. Everything was powered by the large drive wheel underneath. Its metal lugs gripped the ground as the horses pulled the machine forward, powering all the many moving parts. It was quite a fascinating sight to me.
Suddenly, I had one of those revolting developments, a flying insect encounter that discombobulated a fun day. It seems a bumblebee nest was hidden in the ground under the oat straw. Bumblebees are usually not aggressive, but they get upset when noisy binders disturb their home. The bees immediately sent their striped dive bomber guys into the air; and the first one spotted me. I don’t know why me and not the man on the binder ? The bee got me on the back of the hand. Man ! That hurt ! My hand and fingers swelled and stayed stiff for a week.
From time to time, when we weren’t too busy, I used to go down to our old binder, turning the knotter round and round, trying to see how that thing could tie a knot in twine. I rotated the mechanism hundreds of times, watching how and when all the parts moved. I finally began to get a picture of how the mechanism gripped the twine, whirled to form a loop, pulled the gripped ends through the loop, tightened the knot and released. It is still a fascinating machine to me. It was made by McCormick Deering, one of the earliest and best known of U. S. farm machinery makers.