Russ' Vintage Iron

"Waste not, want not" was a phrase I heard quite a bit while growing up. We didn't have a whole lot, but what we did have was not about to be squandered -- something I think many today do not fully understand.

I think this mindset came from all four of my grandparents and their experiences getting married and starting families during height of The Great Depression and having to get by with very little. They raised my parents this way as well.

I can vividly remember my one grandma cutting my hair in her kitchen and darning holes in my socks to help my parents save a little money here and there as they raised me and my two younger sisters. Her son (my dad) to this day does not like to throw anything away that could be useful in the future.

While he is certainly not a hoarder (my mom may disagree with this statement at times), he will keep items others might not find much value in. When I was kid just starting in kids baseball, he built me a batting tee from an old disk blade welded to a worn pipe with a rubber tube on the inside of the pipe.

It didn't look as nice as the store-bought rubber tees, but no one was EVER going to break my farm-strength batting tee!

I thought of the issue of not wasting items recently on the farm as my dad did a couple winter projects.

The first venture he tackled was to build my kids a small playhouse after my 5-year-old son, Burke, asked his grandpa to build him one. Dad managed to build it without purchasing many supplies. The frame was built with pallets we already had, he enclosed the structure with leftover roofing tin we had after having to re-roof our barn last year and plywood leftover from various other projects.

The other project he covered was to convert an old 40-foot-long Kelly Ryan wide elevator into a feed bunk for our cow/calf herd. We use to have several wooden feedbunks, but over the years they fell apart and we replaced them with metal ones, certainly not nice, professionally built ones, but metal ones nonetheless.

For many years, he and my uncle used both this wide elevator and also a narrow one to pick corn in the ear and then later to move shelled grain. We had a corn crib on the farm where I grew up and the narrow elevator was used once in a while to put corn, soybeans and even oats into the bins of corn crib.

The wide elevator was used to unload the grain bin during harvest when the auger was still set up to unload into the bin. Many times, they dried down corn in the bin, moved some it out of the bin with the wide elevator and then put into the bins of the corn crib with the narrow elevator.

When we moved off that farm nearly 20 years ago now, the narrow elevator got hauled off to the metal recycler after a tree branch fell on it. The wide elevator, meanwhile, got moved to the new farm, but had not been used again.

He took the flighting and PTO shaft off, removed the elevator from the frame and used part of the frame and the existing wheels/tires for a support structure towards the back. He then added a half-circle metal frame we had on another bunk at one time closer to the front and you have yourself a 40-foot, portable feedbunk.

With our other feedbunks, which are considerably shorter, sometimes the dominant cow or calf would push the weaker cow/calves away from the limited bunk space. With 40 feet of bunk space to work with, even the most timid cows/calves can hopefully find room at the bunk.

He is certainly not original as many farmers have repurposed equipment over the years to make their jobs easier or more efficient.

The general appearance of these homemade projects may seem crude to some (e.g., my batting tee), and since most farmers are not trained design engineers, they probably do look crude. But if they serve a purpose, make you more efficient and you reuse existing items, then maybe the appearance is not as important as some would think.

Russ Quinn can be reached at russ.quinn@dtn.com
Follow Russ Quinn on Twitter @RussQuinnDTN

(CZ)

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