When we visited Australia in 2012 my friend Leigh showed me around his 1937 AL and we visited the McKay museum in Elmore, Victoria but, at that time, Leigh's wheat crop was not quite fit so I had to make do with trips around a huge "paddock" on a 40' Axial Flow instead.
On this visit however I had warned Leigh we were coming and the dates so he planted his paddock so that it would be ready to harvest whilst we were staying with him for the Fordson Club of Australia weekend in early November. It also allowed him to demonstrate the machine to the many people who attended, some of whom, like me, had never seen such a machine in action.
The stripper/header is very simple, it is like a comb that runs through the crop and pulls the heads from the crop leaving the straw standing in the field. The idea goes back to the 1860's and was perfected by a gentleman named Jesse Riddley but his machine only collected the heads and grain into a chamber at the rear. The grain and chaff then had to be emptied onto the ground and then fed by hand through a winnowing machine before being placed in sack for storage and transport.
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The McKay "Sunshine" stripper/header not only gathered the corn but also threshed, winnowed and collected the grain into a holding tank in the field and from that into the sacks for storage.
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Leigh's 1937 McKay AL
A mass of chains and belts! The machine originally was horse drawn and ground drive but it has been converted to PTO drive.
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The sieve box which moves at right angles to the direction of travel, unlike the modern combine harvesters.
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Oilers with wool wicks lubricate all the moving parts. No grease nipples to this machine.
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More belts, chains and oilers!
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She is finally ready to take to the paddock.
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Mal fits the main drive belts before testing.
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Leigh makes a final check that all the oilers are full.
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I take a chance to get a shot of the front mounted threshing elements before startup.
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And we set off.
Click on the small picture for a short video.
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The stripper comb and the force feeder. When the rope in the picture is pulled the metal frame above the comb drops down and, driven by a cam system, clears any heads that are stuck in the comb.
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The "Super DeLuxe Operators Consul" The big lever and the small pedal set the height of the comb in the crop
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A blockage in the upper peg drum and it is all hands on deck! The covers go back on and off we go again.
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Leigh checks that we are not loosing grain. This machine is surprisingly frugal even if it is 77 years old.
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The harvesting team in full flight!
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Eventually we have to stop the fun and unload the grain.
I have been looking into my ancestors and found that my fourth great uncle and his family settled in Australia in the 1850. Part of this trip was to find out if there were still family members over there and, yes, we did find some, farming in the Beulah area of Victoria. This is an original stripper/header owned by one of them and bought new back in the early years of the last century.
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A push version! Horses were harnessed to this pole at the rear of the stripper header and it was pushed by them into the crop.
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A slightly differnt feed mechanism on a McKay Auto Header. This version is self propelled and could be powered by either a Fordson "F" industrial engine or a Continental.
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The "Super Deluxe Seat and Air Conditioned Cab".
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This sieve box travels in the "normal" direction on the later machines.
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Other manufactures made similar machines when patents ran out.
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This one is a much modified McKay machine, farmer built, to handle and clean clover seed. The threshed seed is elevated from the grain tank by an auger and fed into the cleaning mechanism of another McKay machine mounted on the side.
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Again a much later machine
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McKay Sunshine Works was eventually taken over by Massey Harris and later Massey Ferguson.
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A rare "pick up" fed machine.