Kids like to tinker. Parents have noticed that the kids from an early age who liked to take things apart just to see and build stuff, will likely be mechanically inclined. Girls as well as boys like to tinker.
Kids who didn’t sign up for physics and when asked by their guidance counselor why and answered physics is just common sense, could be either a future tinkerer or an engineer
When I sold the first . . .
modified tractor ever built in the valley by my best friend, who died way too young, to another friend who had been there when it was built, I thought of the many other mysteries that marked my life that were built by true engineers without degrees.
The old tractor (Bullwinkle) had started life as a 33 Massey but the engine had died early in its life. Lorne had pulled the original motor, lengthened the frame to leave room for a 478 black diamond from a wrecked International truck and another eager tinkerer (Don Campbell) widened the rims so Bullwinkle could wear bigger boots. Lorne had also installed power steering and used a side hill lever from a drag plow for a throttle.
Then I remembered that dad had built our first tractor from an old cut down Chevy car and added an auto-trac kit built by the Otaco Company. It pulled a two furrow sulky plow for horses but dad modified it to be pulled by the home-made tractor. Our farm used the home made tractor for several years until it was traded in for a 2N Ford-Ferguson during WWII. Dad wanted a larger tractor but during the war when a new tractor was as scarce as hen’s teeth, you took what you could get.
The old 2N only had three gears and like Dave once said those three gears were slow, slower and damn slow. So in 1950, we traded the 2N for a four speed Ferguson with an overhead valve engine. The early flathead Fords had dry sleeves and were notorious for burning the rings, which required frequent piston ring replacement. Another engineer without a degree who was head mechanic at a local Ford dealership used to pull out the dry sleeves and throw away the pistons from the old 2N and 8N Fords, hone out the cast iron block and install bigger pistons made for the flat head Ford V8s. This eliminated the burnt rings and almost doubled the horsepower of an 8N Ford tractor.
The first modern flour mill and first hydro electric plant were both built by another engineer without a degree. That little electric plant was run by a water impeller at the foot of a dam also built by Mr. Wilson and this hydro plant supplied electric power to Campbell’s Bay Village. This was the first town in Pontiac with hydro.
A few years ago, I visited some cousins in Northern Ontario and was intrigued when I was introduced to a horse drawn tile drainage plow for installing plastic tile drains. I know that the Mennonite who invented this was not an engineer with a degree. It took a couple passes in the same trench even with four horses pulling the drainage plow, to get deep enough and get a perfect grade before putting the plastic drainage pipe through the plow. Just remember that water runs downhill if the grade is right.
Many seeders today are air seeders. The seeds (corn, canola, soybean, or other small grains) are moved from central grain tanks on the seeder, through plastic tubes by air into a slit in the soil made by either disc or tooth. The very first air planter was designed and built in the late 1950s, by a couple of farmers in Illinois. They used an old Maytag washing machine drum which had holes punched in it for the seeds to be metered from. The Black machine was a fold up planter frame which would either plant twelve 30 rows of corn or twenty five rows of 15 soybeans depending if the planter frame was in the wide configuration or the narrow width. In narrow width, it was only fifteen feet wide for transport which made it much easier to travel on the road. The Black machine was designed and built buy a young farm boy in Illinois too. The design was later purchased by the AGCO Corporation.
The first tractor to use water injection to increase horsepower was also built in Pontiac County in a little farm shop. This was not new technology. The Stanley steamer was one of our early cars. The giant black steam engines pulled trains for years in Europe and North America before diesel-electric took over. In the early 1960s, even General Motors briefly introduced a water injected, turbo charged car. After only a few cold weather freeze ups, they discontinued the very efficient car. The first successful use of water injection in a diesel engine was designed and built by Danny Dean and his 466 powered international tractor was the king of tractor pulling for several years. Danny later had the worked over 466 built by a Detroit company and it quickly became the most sought after pulling motor for a decade until others figured it out!
I’ve had the pleasure to work with many excellent engineers over my short life as a farmer. Then there were others that probably were not very successful tinkerers as kids.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
