Farming times seem to be returning like they were in the 80’s. Interest rates are getting high along with expenses, but commodity prices are in the tank. It’s expensive to have stuff fixed and we find ourselves doing more of it ourselves. Because sometimes we just don’t have the money to take it to towns.
I remember as a kid my mentor Lee Roy used to jury rig many things just to get by. One occasion I remember well was an old Heston swather. It had a Wisconsin V-4 air cooled engine that had burned a hole through the aluminum head over one of the cylinders. He had no money to replace the machine so he had to fix it.
You couldn’t find the parts nor did he have the time to look for them. He had no telephone or internet back then and the parts houses came up empty.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. So he took and ground out that hole and found another chunk of aluminum and made a wedge out of it and fitted it to the hole in the head. He drove it in with a hammer and bradded it over on the inside with a ball peen hammer. The then put JB Weld over it on the outside and let it dry. He put an air hose to the spark plug hole and checked it with soapy water on the outside and saw no bubbles. So he put the spark plug back in and readied it to fire up. Now my dad had no faith in that repair and gathered my brother and I up, and stood back about 50 yards or so thinking that was a safe distance from any possibly shrapnel danger.
Lee Roy hit the switch and it started up and ran like normal. It took my dad a while to decide it was gonna hold much to his amazement, before he ventured closer.
I remember running that thing myself for two more years before it finally pooped out. That head never gave out but it lost a crankshaft bearing.
So the next thing he did was he took an old ford 6 cylinder motor off a Ben Pearson cotton picker and mounted it in place of that V-4 Wisconsin. I ran that thing for a year and one day while cutting hay it lost oil pressure and I shut it down. We pulled the pan and we discovered it had broke the crankshaft.
The weight of the pulley’s that ran the machine were too much for those sleeve bearings and that’s why that Wisconsin engine had roller bearings.
Lee Roy then grabbed another engine off another old picker and mounted it again. This time he went to town and had a plate made and a shaft with two pillow block bearings to hold the weight of those pulley’s and put it all together. It ran until he quit farming.
Times are tough so it’s better to fix the faded than to buy the flashy. The payments are more affordable that way.
