These machines are not farmer- or blacksmith-made, as the ironwork is neatly done.

All of the machines I saw had 1926 Fordson-mounted-type Gleaners on them. I saw three of these machines in various stages of decomposition (farmers rob nice iron off has-been equipment).

The tongue hooked to the tractor drawbar these did not have front truck wheels. It must have been something to get through a 16-foot gate. The engine sat crosswise on the mountings on and over the tongue, protruding out more than the wheel. A sprocket was welded right onto the Model T differential pinion gear! It would have had the transmission on it, with the full length driveshaft and housing extending under the feeder housing to where the belt pulley sprocket would have been on the Fordson, which had roller chain going to the jackshaft of the combine. To power the machine, a Ford Model T engine was used (though no engine was ever intact on the machines I saw). The tongue was on the right side of the machine, completely outside of the separator unit, the right wheel being straddled by the two channel irons of the tongue. One of the wheels was under the bin where the left rear wheel of the Fordson was. The frame had two 5-inch channel irons across the frame corresponding to where the mounting irons on the Fordson tractor would have been. In where the Fordson tractor would have been, there was a platform that a man stood on to run the header lever. They were the components of the 1926 Fordson-mounted Gleaner combine, minus the Fordson, mounted on an iron frame, with a tongue and a 3-inch pipe axle with 48-inch wheels to make it into a pull-type combine. There is one type of Gleaner combine I have not come up with much information on. Over the years, I did get to know a lot of interesting people, hear a lot of stories, see and find some interesting machinery (although some of it I did not realize what I was seeing until a lot later). Nothing was like coming home late at night from one of these escapades, getting into bed, and hearing my wife say to me, “Which do you want to hear first: the good news or the bad news?”

I will have to give credit to another daughter and son-in-law who lived close by, and to my wife, who put up with this and kept the home fires going and saw that the chores were done on the farm.

Gleaner combine models