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Windrow fluffers

5

56 Fan 400

Member
I see they actually make them now. In 1980 when I graduated because of Ma Nature, my dad and grandfather made a fluffer out of a baler. What happened is on May 18, 1980, Mt St Helens got heated and blew her top off. They had been doing some custom work outside of Othello and that morning that it blew, I was doing late homework. Needless to say, we never went back to school and I graduated with honors. My mother made me look into my old books the other day and I saw that. I shall post it on this post string in a bit. It is a baler that we used to try to remove the Volcanic ash from the windrows. The 55 baler question brought this back to memory too.
 
36962.jpg


here it is. Case tractor that my dad still has and runs with propane.
 
I live in Central Washington so I too rember well when St Helens blew. I think Othello got more ash than we did though. It was a nasty summer as every time the wind blew it stirred up the ash again and it was really abrasive. Fluffers have been around for quite a while. I remember some guys making hay "turners" out of old balers, that just inverts the windrows. I have also seen those made commercially. Most farmers use fluffers before bailing hay here, opens up windrows so the air gets in to dry them out.
 
Well, dad said that they chopped it up and threw it back down on the ground. The bales were so full of ash, that it was hard to be picked up and the metal/quartz/shavings in the ash were wearing out the balers. I still have a tiny bit of ash in a ice cream nuts container. We took a magnet in it and had shavings come out of it. We looked at the stuff under a baby microscope and saw crystals. By the way, we had international balers that they set up for 100 lb bales. The Freeman balers put out more bales but if I remember correctly, they were set up for 80 lb bales. I shall try to put one more pic of ash on windrows tomorrow as the net is kinda mean today. I tried to upload a couple of pictures and it said no. Have a great day yall.

P.S. My mother said that she was possibly in the news there as they were working and saw another plume of ash on the way. She was busting her butt to get back to the main outbuilding before it got there on the tractor pulling a round rake. Our rake had 4 wheels.
 
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