Milking It for all It's Worth

Another in their collection is the Empire Mechanical Milker, which, despite its fancy name, worked just like any other milking machine, Dennis says. "It has the cups and everything like all the rest," he says. "I think that was just a name they gave it to advertise it." The company's claim to fame was made in their ads, which stated that the Empire Mechanical Milker worked "just like a sucking calf." These were made by Empire Cream Separator Co. of Bloomfield, N.J.

The Clean-Easy was manufactured by one of the companies that had multiple places of business, Dennis says, made by Ben H. Anderson Manufacturing Co. of Clearwater, Fla., but also in Wisconsin. "The reason I remembered that was because in a previous issue of Farm Collector a woman asked if anyone had information about the Clean-Easy, and I copied the information out of the book and sent it to her. In her return letter she said she hadn't found out anything else about it."

A year ago the collection grew quickly when a man offered them three IH milking machines after a show. "He said, 'I'd rather see somebody use them than they just go to waste.' All we had to do was go and pick them up."

The milking machine Dennis has put the most work into is the Hinman Milking Machine made by a company of the same name in Minneapolis. "I fixed the vacuum pump once, but after I got it going at a show, it froze, and I had to take it all apart again."

A routine challenge in collecting milking equipment is finding a unit with a working vacuum compressor wheel. The wheels aren't difficult to fix, Dennis notes, but often need repair. "A series of little boards flip on an eccentric shaft when the shaft goes around," he says. "Those boards get stuck from dirt and gunk caked in there." He removes the boards, which are made of Bakelite but look like wood, cleans them and the slots they fit into, and puts everything back together. He's salvaged boards from duplicates or the occasional beyond-repair unit.

The Nickersons have 16 different milking machines in their collection, plus a few duplicates. "When it comes to Surge, for instance, there are many different kinds," Dennis says. "There are upright buckets, hanging stainless steel aluminum buckets, and so on, and the same goes for De Laval."

In the old days, dairy farmers rarely milked more than two cows at one time, lifting or pulling the milking machine down the center of the barn and attaching teat cups to a cow on each side. "Really," Dennis says, "how many cows you could milk depended on the buckets you had. If you had an upright bucket, you could only milk two cows at one time into one bucket. Today you have so many multiple milkers, but they don't milk into a bucket. Today they can milk many cows at once because the pipeline dumps the milk back into a cooler that holds hundreds and hundreds of gallons. The limiting factor in the old days was the size of the bucket."