Retired Combine Makes Great Seed Cleaner

Retired Combine Makes Great Seed Cleaner COMBINES Conversions 24-3-6 Low wheat prices have most growers looking for ways to save money. Like most Kansas growers, George Keener, Rush Center, plants a lot of bin run seed. He figured he could save time and money. He remembered how clean the grain was that came out of his old Baldwin combine. He still had one of the first ones made (1954 or 1955) sitting in the weeds on the farm. "It had been back there for years. We just parked it when we replaced it with a Deere 8820," he says. "It didn't have the capacity of the new combines, but I've always thought it was about the best combine ever made." George pulled it up to the shop, cleaned it up, lubricated shafts, replaced a few bearings, and proceeded to turn it into a high capacity, stationary grain cleaner. The first thing he did was to remove the header and add a hopper to pour in the grain to be cleaned. Since the engine didn't run anymore, he decided to power it with a tractor pto. The unloading auger for the grain tank was powered by separate pulleys off the engine, so he had to first add a pto shaft to run the combine and then rig a way to get power from the new pto shaft to the auger. "It wasn't that difficult to do," he says. "And it works beautifully. We cleaned it up and replaced a few bearings, but we didn't modify the insides at all." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, George Keener, Rt. 2, Box 16ABC, Rush Center, Kan. 67575 (ph 785 372-4431).

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