Wrong color, but still interesting.

Spent the last week up at Davenport Washington to help my buddy Gene at vintage harvest. Gene is 92 and I hope I’m half as active as he is if I make it that far. Gene and his life long friend Creyton (used to be Headerpuncher on here) started vintage harvest 25 years ago. Anyway, this year decided to rig up his big Harris like he used to run it back in the day. This involved an HD-11 up front with a set of cable controls rigged up so he could steer, run the master clutch, shift gears, and run the throttle from the combine platform. He also had a parking brake control and a rope to pull the kill knob on the tractor. A hydraulic pump on the combine raised and lowered the header instead of the traditional header wheel.

Unfortunately the combine had quite a few bugs to squish, and I spent most of the time squishing them. I didn’t get many pictures, but I’ll post what I got.

BP.

Now the rest of the story. I had my doubts about this lash up, however, Gene insisted it worked well and he ran it this way 9 years or so. So when I got my turn to run it, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it really was to run. Cables on the clutch levers engaged the brakes as you pulled the control rearward. Reminded me of the neighbors D5B SA farm Cat. You could make square corners just as nice as you please.

BP.

Quite the set up Bruce - Thanks for sharing.

Greetings BP: I saw that set up on FB and wondered if you were near it! No such thing as a "wrong color" IMO. That is a cute bug eyed HD-11 too; I wonder how much time your friend spent dialing in the cable controls for its original operation. Did he have a helper, or repeated climbing on the machine and harvester itself? How about the driving? is it better standing or can you sit down?

I hope everyone has a good harvest too.

As always, we thank you for sharing some interesting stuff! Thx! JM