Old Holt parts price catalogs.

I love those old books! Merry Christmas to you and your family!!
Ken

Thanks Ken.  Merry Christmas to you and yours as well.  

BP.  

Very Neat, Just thinking the food that was grown and harvested with those machines kept our ancestors going and lead to bigger faster more capable machines. Incredible history.

Thanks Steve.  It really is amazing how far we’ve come, especially in combines. Although draper headers have made a huge comeback. I haven’t taken the time to a just for inflation, but some of the prices in these are laughable.  

BP. 

I always thought that drapers would be a lower loss mechanism for moving the crop to the threshing chamber than an auger, but I guess the engineers thought it was old school back in the day?

I always thought that drapers would be a lower loss mechanism for moving the crop to the threshing chamber than an auger, but I guess the engineers thought it was old school back in the day?

Ray is correct. Leather, wood, and canvas drapers are a pain in the rear. Draper headers feed so nice though.  When auger headers took over in the beginning of the self propelled era (1950’s), headers were pretty small, 12-16 feet.  Augers made sense for those smaller headers.  Now that headers have gotten so big, 35-50 foot, making an auger that long isn’t practical. Hence the resurgence in the draper.  These new drapers are rubberized with molded in slats. 

Drapers are very common here because of the rice farming. The local canvas shops specialized in draper manufacturing here. JM