Hitched up and going to work. The header is joined by a header box wagon,
which drives along side. The cut grain is delivered onto the header box, where
the loader stacks the loose stalks with a fork:



The old timers told me that the best loaders would end up with the stalks all
going one way on the load. This made it easier to feed the grain into the
separator head first ( somethings never change) After watching this outfit in
operation, that looks like a tall order;



My granddad told me that they used to switch off on the operation.....
'header punch' (drive) for a while, load, drive the header box. He said that
they never let him load for very long because he couldn't get the stalks
going all the same way very well.



One thing that they would do to help with this is to put a twist into the
reel.....first thing that an experienced header guy would do upon delivery
of a new unit was to loosen the bolts on the reel, put a twist in it, then
tighten the bolts back up. From the family collection, a header at work
near Dry Creek with just such a twist in the reel:

There were usually at least two header box wagons per header that would work in relays hauling the cut grain to the stationary separator. Here is the one restored at Dufur. Power comes from a steam engine out of sight to the left of the frame via flat belt to the separator. Just above the belts you can see the feeder where the grain is pitched off the header box to be fed in to be threshed.The clean grain is sacked on the other end. The big tube seen here is the discharge for the straw & chaff, which is blown into a pile and used for livestock feed.



Here you can see the steam engine that provided the power. One wagon is along side being unloaded into the threshing machine while a second one
waits it's turn:



As you can see.....pretty labor intensive. Lots of horses & men.......and a lot
of hot backbreaking work.

As the technology improved and tractors became more reliable & powerful,
then the logical follow on to the system seen above became practical.
Make the separator mobile.......stick the delivery end of the header directly
into the feeder house of the separator.........COMBINE the two ...and presto..



Horse drawn at first......but it didn't take long to stick a tractor out front,
and a lot of the early ones said Caterpillar.



In fact.......a lot of the real early ones said Cat on both the tractor & the
combine:



We've come a long way............

98J- where were those last pics of the lexion combine taken at? Looks very much like the area across the river from me near the towns of Gifford and Reubens. The last shot would be looking west and slightly north with the palouse visible in the background on the far right.

Might be wrong but thats what if looks like to me, good looking combine either way.

Non-existant user wrote:

98J- where were those last pics of the lexion combine taken at? Looks very much like the area across the river from me near the towns of Gifford and Reubens. The last shot would be looking west and slightly north with the palouse visible in the background on the far right.

Might be wrong but thats what if looks like to me, good looking combine either way.

Well NIF, you would know way more about it than me. About all I can tell you about Idaho is that they raise a lot of spuds over there, there is a lot of beautiful country and some of what they raise wheat on is steeper than a cow's face. As per the shots of the Cat combine, I'll bet you're right; I lifted those two shots from the good folks at Hillco down at Nezperce. ( www.hillcotechnologies.com/index.html )
Here is one of those shots used in a print ad for their 2480 Leveling System
that was offered for use on the 460 & 480 combines:



I have been able to pay them back by sending a few photos of their products
in action.



(I made this last example Green so you wouldn't go in to de-fib )

So, a long winded explanation.....the two Cat combine shots are not mine,
and given their origin, I'll bet you are dead on. The three shots of the Cat
pull type & tractor are not mine either.....taken in California if I remember
right & I do believe that I downloaded them from this (ACMOC) site.
( I have.....shall we say......beaucoup...pictures stored in the depths of
my system.....never know when they might come in handy) All of the color
shots above I took; the B&W of the header is a scan from a print from the
family collection.

Got all that spring seed slapped in the ground?? A little snow on top of it this
A.M. perhaps??? And when, pray tell, are you going to do something about
the rotten price of wheat?????

98J- Yep I figured you had picked up those pics off someplace like that.

Got 190 acres of spring wheat in on the the lower elevation ground. Hoping for 70bu on it since it shouldnt be very far behind the winter wheat planted this early.

A little bit of snow along with the rain the past couple days, plenty nippy too.

And we lost the transmission out of the D6C, probably lost a tooth in 6th, finished up cultivating down there and moved it home in 5th and now all the gears are noisy so we will have to pull it out and rebuild it. The tranny has never been touched on that cat so it is time anyway.

"Jim wrote:

This thread gets better everyday, the pictures of the D4 with the side hill pull type combine were great.

There is a chance for me to be in the Spokane WA area the middle of August, I haven't looked how far that is from where you are at. Was wondering if there is any wheat harvest going on then and if there is a chance to come by for a visit.
Thanks, Jim

Yep mid August we are going full bore on a typical year, this year is looking to be more normal than the last couple of years of late harvests. Should be plenty of harvest going on from Spokane down into my area through the palouse. Our place is a 2 1/2 to 3 hour drive from Spokane. Let me know when it gets closer to that time if you want.

Member Bleedinred is pretty close up there. And Bruce P is roughly the same distance from Spokane that I am. 98J is a fairly long ways away though.

Thanks for the response, it is a long time till August, but if it works out I'll be in touch.

I had never seen wheat cut and piled loose as in 98J's pictures, did they use grain binders to bundle the wheat and haul it to the thresher out your way too?

Nice pics of the Caterpillar combine pulled by a 2 TON at Denton, NC. i do believe I took those, I am glad to see you liked them enough to save them.
Here is a link to more shots taken that day in 2005
www.chriscomachinery.com/Denton.htm

"chriscokid" wrote:

Nice pics of the Caterpillar combine pulled by a 2 TON at Denton, NC. i do believe I took those, I am glad to see you liked them enough to save them.
Here is a link to more shots taken that day in 2005
www.chriscomachinery.com/Denton.htm

Cool. That means I was only off by 4 time zones.......
Nice pictures, BTW. I am trying to get my hands on some more of the early Cat pull types.....there were several around here, but pictures of same are hard to come by. The next door neighbors had one.....it had a screw type leveler instead of the rack & pinion type.

I think this is the first combine that my Granddad owned.....a Rumley (sp?)...
Here they are getting set for the day....a lot of work hitching up before you
could do any harvesting. You can see the leveler rack to the right of the
frame (on the separators left side)



At work. Not bad looking wheat for the late 30's......before fertilizing and
weed sprays. A eight horse hitch on this day.



Different day, and four more horses to handle the pull. They are about to head down a pretty nasty hill ( trust me) so good brakes on the combine
were a must. So, the horses could loaf going down, then had to get with it
coming back up the hill. Notice the third wheel on the combine at the back
of the hitch beneath the motor.



The third wheel up forward was continued on the early tractor pulled machines. You can see this in this shot of our 33-H from it's early days on
the ranch. The tongue & wheel castored. Other details in this shot.....
the rack& pinion leveler is clearly visible...the clean grain elevator is set up
to go to either the bulk tank, or the sacking platform ........this is basically
a baby 36B; the same lay out:3 fans, three elevators. And a typical farmer
deal, the stock grain tank wasn't quite big enough, so some home built
extensions. My Granddad ran this machine in this configuration for several
years.



The wheel forward was a hold over from the horse drawn days, and it
caused more problems than it was worth with a tractor out in front. The
cure was to remove it and go with a solid tongue, which was done to this
machine in the early 50's. It resulted in much better control. Some of the
conversions were a tad on the crude side. Go back and look closely at the
early shots of Marv's 51 and you will see a huge wooden beam stuck under
there to make the tongue.

The last year for our 33-H........1967. My Granddad on the combine & a much
younger & thinner version of 98j on the 7u.

NIF Sorry to hear about your tranny. If you haven't allready, talk to Dean Flatt at Columbia Tractor. When he worked for Larsons they had two 17Rs and Dean was the main operater and mechanic. He told me about drilling another hole in the in the oil spray tube in those trannys, so they would squrit oil onto 6th gear, I think. Any way he is very smart on those tractors. My tranny is noisy all the time, and western states did the overhaul before I got it:confused:

98J great pics as usual

Bruce