Found this clip on youtube of binding and thrashing wheat. About 1/2 way through, you'll see them using a C cab tractor conversion pulling the grain binder. Then later, they are loading what appears to be a roaderster pickup with the wheat after thrashing it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSasvzoLR44&NR=1

Is that Happy Farmer tractor an Allis Chalmers?

Herb

That binder is not doing a very good job of tying the bundles, been there, done that. Enjoyed seeing the movie though, hot, dirty, dusty work, especially behind a team.

Notice that the single front wheel was right in front (in-line) with the rt. rear wheel. That would make it easy when plowng to follow the furrow.

My step dad always said a Happy Farmer tractor only made you happy twice. The day you bought it and the day you sold it.

That grain is already too dry to bind. Most of the grain was cut when the stalks were still a little green and then was hand shocked (stooked) and left to dry for a week or so. Then it was pitched into the bundle wagon and hauled into the threshing machine. Most binders won't tie a tight bundle when the grain is that dry and if the grain is too ripe it shells out the heads when it kicks the bundle off the rack.

Harvesting that way is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. It's fun to see but I never need to pitch another bundle in 100+ degree heat. Only did it once when I was a kid. Once was enough.

Herb, the Happy Farmer was made in Wisconsin but it's not an Allis. An Allis Chalmers of that era would be green. About 1930 one of the Allis execs was in California and saw a field of California poppies that inspired him to change the color of the tractors to orange. The video picture isn't very sharp, so I can't tell from the brief glimpse what tractor is stationary power for the thresher. Here's a good picture of a Happy Farmer and an explanation of what Stan's step dad said about it. http://www.farmcollector.com/tractors/happy-days-for-happy-farmer.aspx

Stan, Daddy's people who helped raise me were too poor for such a machine, and not enough arable land to warrant one anyway. They raised Maize (High Gear) much taller then, head high, for the stock. We cut it by hand, you gathered an arm full and cut it off at the ground with a curved knife, not the big, two handed sythe (do you remember the name of the small one ?). You wanted the stalk, leaves, and head, tied it with a piece of binder twine, loaded it in the wagon, took to the house and stood it on end, heads in the air, to dry. I don't recall the word "stooked", must be a yankee word. When you would go to get an armload for the stock, the rats would be in it, and the rattlers after them, so it made for some interesting times. My Grand Daddy finally got a Fordson tractor, we all thought we had died and gone to Heaven.

Never heard of the Happy Farmer tractor and I was born and raised in Wisconsin.
We first used horses on the grain binder then when I was about 10 I pulled the binder with our Ford Fergusen and my dad rode the binder.
Later we got an Oliver 70, then a WC Allis and after that we had an A & a B John Deere and had the two untill the end of our farming.
I was just getting big enough to shock grain when we went to combines though I spent a lot of time helping load bundles on the wagons that took them to the thresher.
The worst job was holding the grain bags at the threasher spout. The dust could get bad in the high humidity heat and the dust from rye was so bad I couldn't do it at all even though I was being paid a dollar a day!
The combine saved a lot of work and grief.
I saw horses that got their tails caught in threasher belt, I've seen guys fall off the bundle wagons, I heard about those who fell onto the threasher feed shute and I've seen rattlers in the grain shocks.
We put two bundles on top of the shock laying horizontally like a thatched roof so the rain and dew wouldn't get in the shock.
When we were threashing and bringing in the bundles we ALWAYS stuck a fork into the top two bundles from the side and pushed down on our end of the fork handle so that if there was a rattler in the top of the shock it would go out the far side.
They would get up inside the shock and lay under those top bundles because it would be warm and dry. They used to say they would be coiled up in there and if you lifed the top bundels straight up the rattler would spring at you. Don't know. We never gave them the chance.

In 1946 when we lived near Mansfield , Missouri we lived on my gradads old farm. When I was old enough I went to work for Findley Family at the location near the place called wof creek, bucking baled hay then when the threshing season came I work for him and several other farmers. My first job was on the grain shoot, sacking the grn as it ws threshed., The next year I was on the stacked grain pithing in the thresher. Seein the thresher ran by a John Deere or a big Farmall brings back memories. On the stack when the first bundles were thrown in the reciever knives that is when you did not want to slip, as you might bethrown out the back of the thresher. Those were the good old days dawn to dusk and at that time 50cents an hour and lunch, and I have to walk to work. I was 12 or 13 years old. Fried chicken, potatoes Ice tea, and all the cold water you could drink. I think we even had salt tablets.

in the second sentence it should be WOLF CREEK

this is an Allis-Chalmers

I've never seen a tractor conversion for a TT before. Anyone have any info or pictures? Dave

Grady "stooked" is mentioned here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js3NYTA6bPQ&NR=1

Herb

Rick, that WD-45 is a beefed-up version of my 1950 WD. It's a real handy item to have around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KxjKH6Hk4o

there were a number of 3 wheel tractors built from 1915 to 1920, many of them with names like Bull, Happy Farmer, and Ford. yes, the Ford tractor was built in Minneapolis.
http://www.antiquefarming.com/tractortesthistory.html


also, the Bull tractor had a Toro built motor, that company is still in business making lawn mowers, etc.

Steve, The biggest problem with a WD is you need one leg shorter than the other to drive one and if you use a "tomato-can garage", the water runs down the manifold. I'm not sure which one designed it Allis or Chalmers Thanks for the youtube.

Mr. Iffrig, thanks for the lead on the movie. I have been involved in a whole lot more than I like to remember in working around binders, I worked in the rice fields on the Texas Gulf Coast when it was all run through a thresher, hundreds and hundreds of acres of rice, all done by hand till it got to the threshing machine. I am thinking "stook" might be a Scandinavian word, I just never heard it used till now. Back to the Christmas music.

Thrashers and binders were before my time but in this area they were always refered to as shocks by the fellows that talk about them.

stook [stuːk]
n
(Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Agriculture) a number of sheaves set upright in a field to dry with their heads together
vb
(Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Agriculture) (tr) to set up (sheaves) in stooks
[variant of stouk, of Germanic origin; compare Middle Low German stūke, Old High German stūhha sleeve]
stooker n

I worked around threshing crews a lot when I was a youngster.
To being with you "shocked" not "stooked" the bundles in stacks with the heads up. Back breaking work, especiall with flax or other short grains.
Then you pitched the bundles up into horse-drawn hayracks - the guys doing this were called "field spikers" who went from wagon to wagon all day.
The hayracks were driven to the thresshing maching were the "machine spikers" piched them into the machines.
The machine fed the grain on chutes to grain wagons where usually young kids levelled it out.
The whole operation went from farm to farm until all were done. Hard, dirty work and very long days.
Before my time, my dad had a steam engine and rig that he contracted to farmers. Had to sleep under the engine at night to keep the boilers fed.
When I go to threshing shows now I say no thanks to helping the crews. I've been through hell!!

RE: "Shocked" and "Stooked." I think this may be a North Dakota term. Probably based in the German immigrants who settled there. Wherever it is from, the definition seems to be about the same for both. The Binder makes "bundles." Those bundles are set upright with a pitchfork into a "shock" or "stook." They guys who did it were called "stookers." They were "stooking oats" etc. When they came back to pick up the stookes they were either "stook pitchers" or "bundle spikers." All you have to do is go to the Makoti, North Dakota Threshing show in October each year and you will find lots of stooks, stookers and stook pitchers. In our part of Montana we "shocked" the grain into "shocks." Except for the German farmers. They "shocked" their grain into "stooks."

Whatever you call it, it is hot, tiring work. You walk a million miles from shock to shock, pack the shocks on a pitchfork and unless there are two of you working together, it is hard to get the shock to set up and stay until you get the other bundles set up beside it. We did not shock grain but when my older brothers were in high school, the local German farmers would keep their girls out of school to shock grain in the fall. They needed every hand to shock grain. By the time I was in high school the only thing that was shocked was oats. The general opinion was that oats needed to be cut greener than other grain and left in a shock until it dried and "made the grain." It was believed it made better feed and kept better in the bin. Oats was (and is) hard to combine without losing quite a few heads when it is ripe on the stalk. New combines handle it well but the old combines ran a lot of oats over the sieves of the combine (and out the back) as well as shattering a lot of heads before it ever got in the combine to be threshed. Oats is almost impossible to use a header on because if you cut it green enough to keep from losing the grain it is too green to dry in the stack and will heat up and possibly burn or will "rust" in the stack. If you leave it until it is ripe on the stalk it will shatter the head going up the elevator of the header and you lose the grain. So oats was shocked up until 30 or 40 years ago. Oats is the reason there are a lot of old threshing machines around. They were kept in working order so the farmer could thresh his oats. Spelt is another story for another day.

Back to "stook."

A bale "stooker" is a different machine. It is a frame made from either pipe or angle iron that drags on the ground behind a square balers and makes "bale stooks." The are built to put several bales on a bottom row, either 6 or 8 depending on who made it. The next row up has fewer and the top row is one wide down the middle. The 12 bale ones were the most common. They put 6 bales on the bottom row, (first lift) 4 on the next row (second lift) and two down the middle of the top row. Then a gate opens and it leaves the 12 bale "stook" in the field. The design covers the crack between the bales with another bale on each row so it will shed rain. It made it a lot easier to load bales as you could pull the wagon up to a stook and load them all without moving the tractor and trailer for each bale or if you had a loader you could pick them up with the loader and haul them to the stack where it took much less hand stacking to stack them in a water tight stack. They worked great in the valleys in Dakota and Iowa, etc., where the hay was thick and still pretty green when it was cut and baled. In fields like ours, dragging the bottom bales around the field until you got 12 bales in the stooker wore the bottom of the bales away so bad you lost quite a bit of the hay. Most of them set in the fence row until they got hauled in for scrap or cut up for the angle iron in them. Gehl manufacturing made some, lots of other small companies made them, they were popular for a few years until New Holland came out with the bale wagon in the 60's and hay gradually came to be put up in big round bales.

Good story Stan. We had an Allis-Chalmers combine (6 ft apron) and the only small grain we ever raise was oats. On a dairy farm, you sort of stay away from rye since if the cows get into it they give "ropey" milk. One year we had a small patch of oats on some lower ground. Dad figured the oats was a going to be tricky to harvest because (if I recall) he and his brothers went on the cheap that year and drilled in oats from the bin rather than buy seed oats. So some of the stuff ripened while some was still on the green side. We pulled the old binder out of the grove, oiled up the joints and by putting only the bottom apron on behind the sickle bar we turned into a makeshift swather. The Allis had come with what my dad refered to as an oats head which was just a pick-up that went on front so you could pick up the swathed grain from the ground rather than cut it with the combine. We only did this once. The combine & attachment all are in the hands of an Allis-Chalmers collector now. The John-Deere binder was scrapped a couple years after we swathed with it. Still have all the cavases for it though.

I know where a TT tractor conversion is complete with ruckstel rearend. What would be a good price on something like this?

Maybe my eyesight is really failing but I can't see a engine in that TT . As it passes by the engine compartment looks empty to me. Anyone else agree or should I head to the eye doctor?

Benjamin I think you are right. There is something going on there that is unusual.

Herb

Herb,
I wonder if there is a power plant in the back going to the tractor conversion somehow. Doesn't really sound like a T but the video's audio is not great either.

Just before it goes off the rt. side of the screen you can see the top hose going to the radiator and later you can see the top of the engine and the top hose again.
There is no coil box on top of the engine so I assume it's a '25 or they are running a distributor.

Not onlt that, but you can see how it starts off from a stop with that super reducion gearing and after about 5 feet he drops it into high pedal and the truck leaps forward indicating to me it is using the T/TT planetary trans.

Aaron, all of the TTs used the firewall mounted coilbox and the '24-'25 syle firewall. Dave

That's right Dave, I had forgotten that.
I think they also had the same old gas tank under the seat too. No?

Yep. Dave

Old postcard from my collection

Howard