2013 - Volume #BFS, Issue #13, Page #120
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Spreader Chain Roasts Hot Dogs Fast
Joe Bower’s manure spreader chain, hot dog roaster just won’t go away. Bower made the rig around 35 years ago, but when Michigan Farmer editor Jennifer Vincent saw it recently, she was intrigued. 
    “I was told it was built by Joe Bower, a farmer in the Fowler area, but I was unsuccessful in my attempts to locate him,” she wrote in a July editorial. 
    It’s easy to see why she was intrigued. Bower took the sprockets and chain from one side of an old spreader and attached the sprockets to each end of a length of steel tubing. He welded short steel rods to the chain to hold up to 40 hot dogs. An electric motor is coupled to one of the sprockets. Set up over an open fire, the hot dogs rotate, exposing first one side and then the other.
    Vincent soon heard from readers who knew Mr. Bower. She found her way to his place near Pewamo, Mich. Now nearly 80, he still runs a 200-cow dairy herd and farms more than 300 acres. He also keeps busy in his shop, which is where Vincent found him.
    He told her he made the hot dog roaster because it, “took too long standing next to the fire to roast those dogs”.
    When FARM SHOW contacted Vincent about the story, she was kind enough to share her quotes and the picture she took of Bower’s roaster. 


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2013 - Volume #BFS, Issue #13