Fwd: Day 34

Day 33 - Chain Tightener 

A load binding tool utilizing the laws of physics, levers and fulcrums. Imagine a truck loaded with logs bound for a trip to the "fuzz mill." Yes a mill for making fuzz. A lengthy logging chain was wrapped around the logs, The hook on one end of the chain attached to a stake pocket on the front of the truck. Then the load binder was attached to the other end of that chain and the second hook of the tool hooked to a stake pocket at the back of the truck. Then grab the handle and put the lever and fulcrum to work to tighten the chain. A process of trial and error to know the exact link in the chain that achieved optimal tightening. It took a lot of force getting the binder to snap shut making sure to keep your fingers clear of the tool handle as it did so. Failing that suffer the pain of smashed fingers. Another OSHA hazard using the tools of the trade. Norb         

 

They were used to chain down a load of logs, but are used on all sorts of loaded material that could fall off a truck bed.  I remember when we got to the paper mill in Park Falls, dad would release the tightener.   He would make a wire loop on the stake pocket on the back of the truck, hook an end of the chain to the wire loop, and re-tighten the load and take out the stakes on the back of the truck.  The chain and wire would hold the load in place, and when the load was lifted, (with a jammer - see attached, it looks like dad's old truck) the wire would hold the load in place until the the box would be at about a 45 degree angle.  The wire would break and the load would all dump at once making a neat large pile.      

Kinda like a come-along. Used with a cable to tighten a load of hay bales - Lou.

This is for lifting something heavy, like an engine out of the compartment. - Dee 

Fwd: Day 36

Day 35 - It is a punch and I'm sure it could be used to remove rivets from many things.  It  has a label on it (Oregon) so I assume is was built by the same company that makes chains for chain saws, and it was used to take a chain apart.  

Bench-mounted press that punched jokes in leather harnessing. Could also install grommets. -

Lou

A punch of sort to for bearings—getting them to fit inside the sleeve - Dee 

This. no doubt, was used to pierce  ears in the old days. It quickly led to clip on earings. - Barb

Cows stuck in the barn all winter

Hi All,

Though Dennis' photo of the sileage fork may not yet be posted to this blog, Norb's reflection about how the cows liked the sileage is posted below. Norb's narrative reminded me of my jury duty on a civil trial in Milwaukee a long time ago.

It's amazing what a person learns serving on a jury. The lesson that came through to me had to do with the energy crisis in the 70's and what cows like to eat.

Before jury duty, I didn't know about dietary choices made by cows. The defendants' attorney explained it all during this trial. Most cows stuck in a barn in the winter, like sileage which is really pickled corn. The mileage at our farm was thrown on top of the dry hay to make the dry hay a bit more palatable for our diary cows.

You know when you are driving through farm country today, you often see long winnowed white plastic bags near a barn. These bags are filled with moist mash from breweries.

Before that energy crisis, breweries (Miller, Pabst, Point, Leininkugels, and others) dried the hops and grains they used to brew beer. These breweries siphoned off whatever the grains provided to make beer and then dried the grain leftovers which they sold to farmers. The energy crisis raised the cost of heat it took to dry these grains which led breweries to sell wet mash to farmers. Farmers were well award that cows will not eat moldy food.

What farmers and breweries learned from the sale of wet mash is that cows liked the wet stuff better than the dry stuff. The problem with selling this mash wet had to do with mold. Cows wouldn't eat moldy mash and only large farms with big herds of cattle could use the mash from these breweries until an inventor in LaCrosse came up with these plastic bags that attached onto a funnel like device on the back of big semis. The wet mash was spilled into these bags and the mash did not get moldy.

These semis delivered the wet mash that was dumped into the plastic bags that you see dotting the farm landscapes in Wisconsin. 

As Norb's post explains, working in farm silos was quite dangerous. Once that frozen sileage began to thaw, it was possible that it would fall away from the sides of the silo and collapse into the floor and if you were in the silo, you could get covered by the sileage. In my lifetime, it happened to a neighbor, Johnny Kucaba who survived.

	Apr 14, 2020, 9:09 PM (15 hours ago)
to Alisa, Ann, Barb, Brian, Cindy, Danny, Dave, Dee, Denise, Doug, Joan, Kathi, Kelly, Kristin, Louis, Louis, me, Marilyn, Marshall, Norb, Pat, Pauline, Pauline, Peter, Rick, Steve, Susan, Taylor, Tracy, Tracy

Norb's explanation attached for day 20

Silage fork. Think of it as a cow’s serving utensil. Every day one of us kids would climb into the silo and throw silage down the chute – enough to feed one helping to each cow. This was not the fork used inside the silo. That would have been a long handled fork with about 8 tines. For the task at hand that was the better tool for dealing with the compacted silage. In the dead of winter it was compacted and frozen solid around the walls of the silo. It had to be chipped away but chipping didn’t work very well. Over time a wall of this frozen silage formed and could be as much as 10 feet high. Another OSHA violation by today’s standards. With the onset of spring and warmer temperatures this wall would start to thaw and subject to cave in. 

Dad would then take this fork and deliver one scoop of silage to each cow. Different cows had different appetites. Some were fussy eaters. Virtually all of them liked silage. But some of them would wait until a mixture of ground oats, corn and vitamin supplements were sprinkled on top of the silage before they would start eating. Think dollop of Kool Whip! Kind of spoiled you might say – much like dogs who will hold out for canned dog food to be added to the dry food.  For cows facing the north side of the barn, the silage was scooped into a metal bushel basket and carried across. This activity was wedged in between switching milking machines from cow to cow. Multi-tasking!   

When the corn crop was harvested, chopped and blown into the silo, we seasoned the corn by spreading bags of powdered molasses between layers of corn. I remember the sweet smell of the silage but not enough to make me want to eat any of it. Our cows were spoiled and they loved it – most of them anyway. The ones that didn’t the cow next to them reached over to help herself. 

There was a health hazard of the corn chopping process. Sometimes, metal like barbed wire or nails would get chopped up in with the corn unbeknownst to us and certainly not the cows. If they ingested the metal and it became lodged in one of their stomachs they suffered loss of appetite. Usually it was a terminal illness. We referred to this illness as “hardware.” There was an effective remedy for this. We could have an essay question “Describe what was done to protect cows from dying if they swallowed hardware?

I’ll close with that except to conclude that when it came to spring and the silo was almost empty, the job of tossing silage down the chute switched to being a job of tossing it up. The floor of the silo was 5 or 6 feet below grade level. Not as much fun.       

Attachments area

Barn Again accordion movie 2018

Who knew when this video was taken at the barn party Friday night gathering in 2018 that the final party would happen in September 2019?

Addition to the logging story

Adding to the Queenie story, I remember we shared her with Uncle Joe.  He used her for skidding logs also.  I don't know how we transported her, maybe she was just walked over.  Queenie never liked getting the harness put on.  I remember her trying to take a bite out of dad's shoulder as he harnessed her.  She knew what was coming.

I spend a quite a bit of time looking at her backside.  We used her to pull trees out of the woods.  Dad would cut down a tree and I would hook it up to the harness and off we would go to the landing.  I would hang on the reins as long as it could, but it was hard to keep pace with the tree banging along the ground.  I usually let go of the reins and she would be waiting at the landing for me to unhitch the tree.  Back we would go for another tree.  She was really powerful and would almost be down on her front knees to get more weight into the harness.  

I also remember the tree cutting event with Joanie.  We kept asking, do we have a cord yet.  We didn't have a chain saw so used a swede saw to cut the tree (balsam) down and limb it out with an axe.   I remember dad hiring Adrian Vandevort who had a chain saw to cut the trees into 8 foot lengths.  Dennis 

Pictures Day 10-14

Thrashing Days at the farm in the 50's Norb.s memories

Den’s quiz question #11 brought memories of “Thrashing Days” that I decided to write about. My earliest memories would probably have been about 1949. Come thrashing time all of the neighboring farmers would help each other. Every day they would move to a different farm, each farmer bringing their tractor and wagon. When it came our time I found it so exciting – so much so that I could not sleep the night before. There was only one negative and that was if Joe Smugala would be coming because he had a huge Chow dog. I don’t remember his name – he may not even have had a name, but he was black and I was afraid to death of him. I can remember whenever they came I would position Dad between me and the dog and hang onto to dad’s leg. Fortunately Joe was not normally on the traveling thrashing crew for reasons I don’t know. 

So on thrashing day Charlie Kralicek came pulling the thrashing machine with his Minneapolis Moline tractor, George Kralicek came pulling his wagon with his Minneapolis Moline Tractor. Cyril Kralicek came with himself, no tractor, no wagon, in his bib overalls and white tee shirt ready to drive and talk smart. Other farmers too – maybe the Palmers, Marlengas, Angels. Never Earl Russell who lived right across the road because he was hauling milk. Dad was not there first thing because he too was on his milk route. 

Preceding this day by a week or so, the oats was cut using an oats binder that created bundles of oats wrapped with twine. Then we had to “shock” the oats – not in the sense of electrical shock but to stack these bundles vertically in clusters by leaning them against each other. I was not good at this – I had a hard time keeping them from toppling over. The shocks of oats were left to dry until thrashing day.

On that day, the oats bundles were tossed onto wagons using pitch forks and hauled to the thrashing machine now being powered by the Minneapolis Moline revved to high RPMs powered with a belt about 30 feet long connecting a pulley on the tractor to a pulley on the thrashing machine. The tractor made lots of noise, no muffler – only a straight pipe – and no ear protection.

As you can imagine there were many jobs. Charlie usually stood atop the thrashing machine waiting for something to break. Charlie’s machinery was not in the best working order. It was never a question of IF but WHEN the breakdown would happen. He always seemed to get things working again even though he had just one tool in his kit – a hammer. Well actually he had two tools, both of them hammers – one small, one large. 

The thrashing work is only a part of the story. There was lunch break when everything stopped. Everybody was treated to a sit down meal. At our farm this was more like a feast and was “all in” preparing for this. When they moved on to other farms, Dad having been spoiled by Sylvia’s cooking was not always happy to eat elsewhere. When he would return home Mom’s first question was “what did she serve?” Dad was a pretty good food critic and his answers were not always in the most glowing terms. None of these were people in our close circle of friends. 

Then there was the mid afternoon beverage break – of which there might be more than one. The milk cooling tank had a couple of cases of beer – always “shorties” – I don’t think they even sell shorters anymore – Pabst or Schlitz.

Back to thrashing. By the look and sound of Charlie’s old thrashing machine it was nearing end of life.  Eventually no amount of pounding could revive it. That’s when Das moved to hiring somebody who owned a combine.  Fast forward to about 1955. 

This was the Kula brothers. I don’t think I’ve spelled their name correctly. I don’t know their first names – to  us kids they were the brothers. They had a John Deere combine powered by a Wisconsin engine and pulled by a very large and very old tractor. One of the brothers never spoke and I don’t think he could hear. The other brother had built a platform on the back of the tractor. The physically challenged brother sat on this platform facing the combine and watched so everything was in good order and would adjust the height of the sickle bar. We had them harvest the oats for 2 or 3 ye

ars.

Fast forward to about 1958 and wouldn’t you know Charlie Kralicek returns with a combine all his own. It was an off brand – maybe made by JI Case because it had colors as if it were a case.   

Logging chain photo

Even though the logging chain photo has not been posted:

This logging chain photo reminded me of a Christmas vacation after we moved to our new house at the farm, around  1954. Joanie, Den, and Norb or Barb, do you remember/?

I must have been home from Our Lady of Sorrows HS for Christmas break. Joanie was with us and Dad told us that we could go out to the woods with him to log. He told us if we cut down trees and made a cord of logs, we could split what he would get for that cord when he sold it --- $40. At that time, around 1954, that amount of money seemed a fortune.

Every day, Den, Norb, Joanie, Barb(may have been too young), and I ventured into the forest to log with Dad. When it was time to come home (he drove out to the woods with his logging truck - which, as Norb has observed, was converted from a milk hauling truck into a logging truck), we put on our skis, hung on to the back of the truck and with dad driving, we skied home. These days, being hauled around at the end of the bed of a logging truck like that would be considered dangerous.

After spending about a week at this logging operation, Dad measured what we had stacked up and said it was about a half a cord. Disappointing news for us. Then, it was time to go back to school.

Before my departure for OLS, dad gave each of us $15 approximately what we would have earned had we piled up a cord of logs. Then, I got laryngitis. End of story.

Dennis and Kristin, your posting of these photos has unleashed a treasure trove of memories. Thank you.

Farm Quiz

Marilyn and I were at the farm on house arrest and we did a lot of cleaning and ripping out stuff in the barn.  I ran across 50 items that are somewhat unique, old, and some of little use.  At any rate, for those who care to participate, I will send out a picture per day and you have to identify it.  You get a point for identifying it, a point for what it was used for and maybe a point if you have a unique story.  Participating is your choice.  You can participate as couples if you wish. NO CHEATING, like using the internet to search.

Day 1 

Day 2

Day 3

 Day 4

 Day 5

 Day 6

Day 7

 Day 8

Day 9