Roy writes: ‘I wish to explain something which appears in
the caption under the picture about the engine being four cylinder.
From the picture you will note there are two cylinders on each
side, one is high pressure and the other low pressure. They are
both connected to the same cross head by a very clever arrangement.
The steam chests and valve arrangement is on the side of the
motion under the boiler.’
You will notice the machine has a web stacker. All western lima
bean machines were equipped with such a stacker. The hardest job to
keep a man for was on the stack. There is no grain grown that is as
dusty as beans, for they are not cut in the truest sense of the
word. They are cut by what is known as a bean sled. The blades on
this sled are somewhat like a plow share, only five or six times
longer. They have to be sharpened the same as a plow share, so the
bean vines are actually pulled and not cut. This is why there is so
much dirt connected with the vines.
To do away with the man on the stack, I built the endless apron
stacker as you can see in two of the pictures. It was narrow and
ran quite fast so it would shoot the straw as it cam off the racks,
in stead of just jumping it close to the-irear of the machine. I
built it so it could be raised or lowered and swung in a half
circle, so this did away with a man on the stack.
Some of the old time grain thresherman may wonder why a blower
was not employed on these machines. The straw is very viney and
when a little tough, it has a tendency to wrap on shafting, so we
always used the web stacker. Now, all of the bean threshing is done
by the pick-up machines.
In two of the pictures, the person closest to the drive pulley
on the machine is yours truly. Of course, I was much younger then
than I am now.
When I built this machine, it was during the depression days and
as money was scarce as hens teeth, I had to have some blacksmith
work done on the machine. This amounted to about $150. The man who
did the work, being a friend of mine suggested we go into
partnership, which we did for the first year. We didn’t fare so
well financially, so he took the machine from me and changed it a
little and ran it himself for about two weeks. Unfortunately, he
got his left arm caught in the main drive belt and got it taken off
above the elbow – poor fellow! I then paid him what I owed him and
then ran it through ’46.