One of my favorite pieces of farm equipment to ride was the Allis Chalmers All Crop 60 combine. It was the largest piece of equipment on the farm, made lots of noise, made the most dust, shook the hardest, and had the single largest moving component of any other equipment. What wasn’t there to like with all those fine qualities. Oh, and on the side, it also produced tons and tons of oats every August, used to feed the cattle.
There wasn’t much to do when riding the combine but enjoy the show and not fall off and get ground up into the mess of pulleys, belts, and chains. The working end started with a six foot wide sickle, cutting all the oats in it’s path as it is pulled down the field. A large paddle wheel type structure, controlled by the driver on the tractor, gracefully turned to coax the grain to fall backward onto the moving apron. From the turning apron the grain would ride up into the chamber from hell where it would be pinched flat by another overhead conveyor apron, and directed into high speed wheel of steel would beat the crap out of the oats stalks. The intention was the proverbial separating the wheat from the chaff, or in this case, the oats from the straw.
After the whooping it received, the battered straw was tossed into the back hopper, where a chain conveyer would move the oats back along a shaker that totally abused the straw with the intentions of shaking off any last remaining grain from the straw. A blower assisted this effort by providing a cushion of air under the straw to help the grain fall, and to produce that cool cloud of choking dust that followed the machine. The tossed grain would again be directed to the grain conveyor area, while the straw unceremoniously get tossed out the side of the combine like a bouncer tossing a riff-raff out into the street
The grain, collected from the many sources, was directed to the top auger / screen. Another auger pushed the grain along a cylinder screen, where all the small weed seeds and other assorted weed seeds and half truths would be pushed through the screen while the meaty whole grains would move forward to the end zone, then get dumped into the large prominent square bin. The seeds would get pushed along the bottom and end up in a burlap bag clipped to the end of the auger. One of the few jobs I had while riding along was to keep the seeds bag from filling up. Reach into the bag and give a little push of the warm mess to the side or back of the bag and you had lots more room for the weed mutants. I remember how the bag of seeds would be so warm, almost hot when you stuck your hand into the middle of the bag. It smelled funny too.
The true role as the rider was being the contact person when it was time to dump the oats into the wagon or gravity bin. Hopefully, the timing was always that the driver of the bin could fill up, drive to the barn, unload the grain, and be back in time for another load without the combine having to stop and wait. It usually worked that way too.
When time to dump, the bin would pull up along side to the combine which came to a stop but kept power to the combine. I would reach up to the top of the overhanging auger and flip over the downspout that directed the grain. Then I would reach back and flip the short lever capped with a golfball type knob near the bottom of the weed bag. With the flip of the clutch lever and the resulting loud thunk, the power takeoff would engage the auger and the grain was now on the way up the side auger, only to fall into the gravity bin. The transfer had begun! Oh, the power I had as a kid to make that happen!
One of the other cool parts of the combine was the straw chute. Since the combine only cut a 6 foot swath through the field, it had the ability to double up on the swath of straw it left behind, so when done, the field hand half the number of straw rows to process. The chute, when closed, would direct the straw down and slightly underneath the combine. On the next lap around the field, the chute would be open by a pull of a rope, and the straw would take a short ride as the chute directed the straw several feet away from the combine. That second row just so happened to be on top of the same row deposited in the previous round. The net result was with two rounds around the field, you would end up with one row of straw to be processed later.
The straw would later be chopped up and blown into the barn for cow bedding.
Once started, weather permitting, one would try to combine as much oats as possible in a day. Around 6pm on hot August evenings, the oats would start getting tougher to combine. When the rotating beater bay would start to jam up, and you were spending as much time unclogging the beater bar as you were combining, then it was time to call it a day. Probably time to go milk cows away. The WD45 tractor and combine would be left in the field, and work would pick up the next morning after the sun had time to burn off the dew.
No other piece of equipment converted the energy of a single rotating shaft into so many moving parts going different directions, with different missions, all at the same time. The entire back of the combine was a series of belts and pulleys to distribute power to all the individual working components.
This model Allis Chalmers 60 was known as the “all crop” harvester and for good reason. It worked on all sorts of grains. All that was required was to slide the old weed screen out and slide a new weed screen in to accommodate the type of grains being harvested. For a while, Dan would harvest soy beans from a few acres out next to the woods. A quick changed of the weed screens was all was needed to turn the Allis Chalmers combine into a soy bean killing machine! Everything else worked the same.
At the end of the season, it was time to put away the combine into the open shed. It was always a trick to put the combine to bed because the combine was taller than the opening in the shed. That resulted in a simple trick that we use to do in order to make an 11 foot combine fit in a 10 foot opening. If the equipment is too tall to fit, we would lower the equipment. How does one do that? Simple. You get a shovel and dig a trench into the direct floor so the wheel on the high side of the combine would drop down into the trench as it was backed into the shed. It only needed to be about five feet long as once the high part of the combine was safely inside the shed, then combine would lift back up and resume it’s rightful proud posture safely inside under cover. There it would sit, after a job well done, through the next three seasons waiting for the next fall harvest.
LEASONS LEARNED
The combined was powered by the tractor motor, with the power delivered by a power shaft connected to the tractor. That energy was directed to belts and pulleys that cut, turned, shook, lifted, pulverized, and fanned, all at the same time. It didn’t get any better than that. The combine was an orchestra, and the tractor driver was the conductor that controlled the speed and the output of the body of work.
UPDATE: The Allis Chalmers combine still sits in the open shed, haven’t been used in several decades. Aside from needing some oil and grease, and probably some new belts, I would be ready to go again, whittling away in ever decreasing laps around a 20 acre field, eating 6 feet at a time. Perhaps it would need a new apron. Those probably don’t exist anywhere in the US these days.
These were popular combines for their time, and according to internet sources, Allis Chalmers sold about 300,000 of them. They were the equipment that replaced the thrashers that were so big, heavy and slow, they would be parked outside the barn and the oats would be brought to the thrashers instead of the other way around.
Here the combine sits, motionless for at least 45 years. Not visible in this photograph are all the belts and pulleys that are located on the very back of this killing machine.