Good old days revisited

Guess I wasn't the only one to abuse an old tractor! Lol!

Mike M, When we sold it, the 50 was jumping out of 6th gear. (Smile)

NY986, Yes there was something romantic about silo filling. I used to tear through the house like Cochise on the warpath to get my school clothes changed and hope to get in on three or four loads of corn before chores. It WAS a lot less physical labor than haying. AND a whole lot cleaner, too.

TomsTractorsandToys, Pop did some custom cutting, too. In later years we had a Clover blower coupled to a Turbocharged 4010. Used the override part of the throttle. You just opened the wagons wide open and got out of the way. Didn't take long to put a load over the top, but yes, it was rough on the blower. Even rougher on the blower when you forget to take the 20 ton jack out of the wagon cross conveyor before unloading. She went over the top, but the blower was never quite the same after that!

Randy, I can remember as a kid being inside a silo and having the feeling it was going over by looking up and watching the clouds go by. Really was a weird feeling!

I remember my uncle doing the same thing with a bottle jack. Things came to a screeching halt.

I remember being about 6 or 7 yrs old and filling silo. At the end of the day I begged my dad to let me put the old john deeere G away in the shed. Well it was on the blower and they had the clutch set up quite a ways.
I remember having a hard time getting the clutch over center when I headed for the shed. I pulled into shed and tried to pull the clutch out and could not get the ole G to stop. Should of just shut it off or choked it but did not dawn on me Remember dad running for the shed but to late out the other end of shed I went. Did not make any difference to the Ole G that the door was closed.
Dad was not to happy but said it was more his fault then mine. Scared the daylights out of me.

When I was a kid, back in the fifties, I had a neighbor that did a lot of custom silo filling. After a long season, on the last 40' silo, he threw a 5# bag of flour in the blower just as the silo was nearly full. A farm hand was in the silo, leveling out the silage, since the silo was nearly full. When the white cloud of dust hit the top, the poor guy was scared to death and could have jumped or fallen off the silo. Thankfully, he survived to get revenge.

I remember working for a farmer who grew a great corn crop in his marshland. Corn was at least 14 feet high. He used a fox six or eight knife chopper with a Leroy engine on it. The chopper was pulled with a Clettrac tractor. I would have to drive the box truck along the chopper and tractor. Probably about 20 inches from the track.
All was fine and good if the chopper could keep up with in incoming corn. If it didn't he would slow the tractor but there was no stopping of the truck unless you wanted to sink it. Had to keep the truck moving. When you came back under the blower again it could sure mess up the windshield with corn juice. Trying to get back into position again within twenty inches of the track was thrilling. We had to use the truck since the field was about eight miles from the home farm.

I'd have come outta that silo like a mad man and that sob would have been the next thing up the blower.

Dad ran a toolbox in his 540 blower that was running 1000 pto. One new blower and sixty ft. of new plastic blower pipe later they were going again.The worst ever was the day he traded his Deere 34 chopper for a brand new 38. His farm was hilly and he was chopping strips. He chopped his 112 chuck wagon full finishing the strip at the top of the hill and moved to the lower strip filling his 110 chuck wagon. He parked the 4020 and new 38 at the bottom of the hill and took the 110 in to unload and eat lunch. When he came back to the field he found that the 112 wagon had ran down the hill backward and hit the 38 chopper on the cutterhead side destroying it.He called the dealer and the delivery man had not even made it back with his 34 yet. Because he used John Deere credit the machine was insured and he had another new one the next morning. The wagon only needed a little work so it could of been worse but the chopper was always parked uphill of the wagons after that. Then there was the time my Grandfather was chopping with an old Gehl flywheel type chopper and the wagon came unhooked and bumped the drive pully forward just enough that the chopper knives hit the shearbar destroying everything. He was sure that the left wheel even came off the ground.LOL He then bought a new 780 Allis chalmers chopper. Tom

One of my wife's brothers told about when he was a teenager, before silo filling his foster father would go to the local sale barn and buy an old crow bait horse for $20. He'd then put the horse in the silo and begin blowing corn in. The horse would naturally stomp around inside the silo to keep on top of the corn, and pack it in the process.

When the silo was full and the horse was on the top, the old man would take his .30-.30, shoot the horse off the top of the silo, make tankage out of him, and feed him to the hogs.

A gal from the local Humane Society got wind of it, came out, and threw a two hour tantrum in the yard. It all went in one ear and out the other. Next time silo filling came around it was business as usual.

I'm still laughing,one of the best stories I've heard,horse in the silo.thanks.

Fixed the chopper wagon once. Took a break and left the hammer in the wagon. We remember the hammer when the blower shroud popped apart.

My brother said once they were putting up straw and the fork slipped in the blower and the head got stuck in the ceiling of the barn, it eventually got pulled down because I don't recall seeing it anywhere.

When I was a teenager in the seventies my dad bought an old steel wheel cutter box and we used to run our straw through it. We square baled the straw and ran it through the cutter box one slab at a time. The metal bar that the knives cut against came loose and went through with a horrible racket, and we all ran for the shelter of the barn. About a minute later everything seemed to calm down so we started to go outside again, when suddenly that chunk of steel came back to earth right beside the cutter box, right about where we were going to stand to see what happened. That thing must have gone an awful long ways into the air to take a whole minute to fall back to earth.