Chasing logging tractor

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philip

Last night about dark I heard a strange whistle and instantly felt the need to grab my camera and investigate the noise. The little town I live in was having a small Christmas parade "that I had no idea about". So I chase this steam tractor down the main street of town and captured these images.
 

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philip

The man and his machine:thumb: A gentleman I might add! Used to use it for logging. By the way its a Case tractor. When it was going down main street it was belchin smoke. Everyone was covering there mouths and others were trying to get upwind. It was great! Its a coal burner.
 

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philip

a little off topic / Santa's wife

Couldn't resist posting this:
 

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TrainClown

Member
Nothing like a train with no track:thumb: I just love these things and almost bought a live steam model of one once. Wish I had now. I'm out on the prairie where there are alot of those fine machines. Some of them still work like new and have never been refitted. A few summers ago when a tractor pull came to town, to start the show they brought out this old Case steamer and had it try to pull the sled down the track, just for fun, and it got 3/4 of the way befor it ran out of steam. The crowd went wild! It was the slowest, but for me the most fun pull of the night. Much more fun than those 3 engine dragster tractors.

Oh yea, they also had a guy in a model E Ford truck running loops around the Case as he did his pull. The Ford was an all origonal, wood cab, relic from about 1918 I think.

This is a prairie garden ornament :D
 

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TrainClown

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Don't let a little snow slow you down. Do what the REAL men do. Get a SNOW MOBILE.
 

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TrainClown

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Another goody! :thumb:

"Hey guys, lets go down to the mall and cruze chicks!"
 

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philip

enlarged photo

This was my grandfathers tractor. Thats him standing there. Newton Rone Taylor from Mt. Pleasant, KY. date unknown. Any takers on what the activity is? I have no idea..........phil
 

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TrainClown

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Sure, I know what's going on. They are harvesting grain and that machine behind the tractor is a threshing machine. What you don't see in this pic is the buffalo hide drive belt, usually about 10 or 12 inches wide, that runs from the flywheel back to operate the threshing machine sometimes as far as 40 feet away. You can see just a little bit of the belt, it's that dark line that runs from the top of the back wheel to the thresher. The horizon is just below that line, and the guy there is checking the belt to see if it is running true. If the belt starts to walk off the pulleys then they have to move the whole tractor and try to line it up better. He also has to keep an eye on the tension on the belt so they don't wear it out prematurely.

The engineer is only really concerned with the running of the engine itself.

The guy on top of the thresher is feeding the machine and keeping the hay from clogging up the works. Probably the most dangerous job there. One false move and............

The guy on the ground beside the thresher is feeding hay to the guy on the top. You can just sort of make out his pitchfork laden with hay as he is just throwing it up.

What you don't see in this pic is the crew of guys loading the bales on a wagon to the right of the pic, or the gang of fellas who are hauling the raw hay over to the machine. Quite the operation!

I think threshers are fascinating machines. But I'm from the west coast. The farmers here in Saskatchewan have no use for the old threshers and they mostly rot away in fields. My brother-in-law, Delbert, who is a farmer just outside of Melville has an old thresher lying on its side in a slough. I was out for a ride on his quad one afternoon and came accross this immense complicated machine. They are quite big. I stopped and just looked at the thing for about a half hour and tried to figure out what all the axles and levers did. Looked like a museum piece to me. I asked Delbert about it and he was less than enthusiastic. He said it was a nuisance and he was going to take his bulldozer out and flatten it one day just so he could stop looking at it.

Everyone wants the tractors, nobody wants the treshers.........or so I thought.

I was doing a clown-magic show in Moose Jaw 2 summers ago and as part of the festivities they had a farm fair set up with all sorts of old equipment. They had a nice selection of traction engines, some old giant single cylinder static gasoline engines and they had a threshing machine. They demonstrated the thresher as they demonstrated all the equipment. They also had a home made saw mill that ran off a belt drive too.

But the thresher caught my eye. It still looked like a lot of work, but hay went in one end, and nice bales of hay came out the other end. They threw a belt too. That really got the crowd going.;)

TrainClown
 
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philip

TC: Seems there in your neck of the woods a lot of relics laying around. Nothing like that here in the USA. Either rusted away or scooped up by collectors. Most of the steel stuff was scrapped during WW II. Thanks for the information!

Philip
 
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