Mid-America Show 43

Time again for the visit to the Mid-America Threshing and Antique Show.  This is the 43rd annual edition.  This year's featured machinery is by Allis-Chalmers.

Allis-Chalmers Company was formed in 1901 by the merging of the Edward P. Allis Company, manufacturer of steam engines and mining equipment, with Fraser and Chalmers, makers of mining equipment, along with Dickson Manufacturing Co. and Gates Iron Works.  They currently manufacture farm equipment, heavy construction equipment, generators and engines, stuff marketed worldwide.

Really old.

 

Not quite so old, but restored.

Besides A-C, there were many other marques represented.

These labels were on the tractor below.

And what's this?  My guess: Someone loves his wife or his daughter, or someone loves herself more than they love the tractor.  Nicely restored machine, though.

I have attended many editions of the MTA show here in Tipton.  But then it is close by.

2010

 2013 

2013

2014 

2015

2016

Old Machinery

I attended the Mid-America Threshing and Antique Show again this year.  I have rather made it an annual excursion, inasmuch as the venue is just a nice bike ride from home.

In the past I have shown you tractors and steam mills at work.  This year my camera concentrated on badging.  Here is some of what it saw.

 The A Model gets a full-vehicle shot.

Word of the day: badging

Conversations with Random People: Three

Same morning I met Bill, couple hundred yards along the way I saw a trailer with three, three! Sandwich engines.  Old guy (how is it so many of the people at these things are old guys?) sitting behind the display in an old webbed aluminum lawn chair.  Fellow looked to be quite physically fit, probably six feet, two hundred.  White hair in marine style crew.  Not bald, but any shorter and all the hair would still be inside the scalp.

I walked around the trailer eyeing the engines. The largest had a flywheel probably 24 inches, rated 2.5 hp, meaning in this case, two and one-half real horsepower.  The smallest was mounted on an old reel-type lawn mower.  I don't recall ever having  seen a pop-and-spin engine on a lawn mower. The third engine was somewhere between these two in size.  Now I was eight feet from the owner, who had been watching my interest with interest.

"What motivated you to collect and restore Sandwich engines?" I queried.

"Collect 'em.  Not so much into restoring them," he said.  Got interested in collecting because I grew up in Sandwich, Illinois."

"Where is Sandwich?"

"About forty miles west of Chicago."

"Wife is from Illinois.  Born in Mt. Vernon, spent several of her childhood years in Chicago before returning to Mt. Vernon."

"Mt. Vernon.  Somewhere in southern Illinois?"

"Yeah," I averred.  "It's on I-57, hour or so south of I-70.  On 64 hour or so west of St. Louis."

We chatted a bit about roads, how one gets from here to there and such like.  Then, eyeing my bicycle, he said, "Antique Scwinn?"

"No," I replied, "a fairly recent old-style look-alike.  It's maybe fifteen years old."

Then he said, "Got my Schwinn in 1946 when I was 12 years old.  I still have it."

"So I guess we are the same age.  I got my first new bike in 1946 when I was twelve years old.  It was stolen when I was a senior in high school, though, so I don't have it anymore."

"Really.  How old are you, then?"

"Seventy-nine."

"When was your birthday?"

"Turned seventy-nine in July."

"You got me by a couple of months," he said.  "I'll be seventy-nine in October."

"Hang in there! Nice talking with you."  I mounted my wheel.

"Drop back by.  I'll probably be starting these up a little later."

My Father Might Have Said... #T

..."A dull knife is a symptom of a dull mind."  Or, "A workman who doesn't take care of his tools won't do anything else right, either."

My father could repair more things with a pocket knife, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers than most man could do with any tools at their disposal.  This is a statement of fact, with no disrespect to the mechanic, the artisan, the maintenance person whose trade it is to "fix" things.  But most people can't fix stuff.

No one, it seems, repairs anything anymore, a trend Dad saw coming and seriously deplored. Throwing things away gets people into deep financial trouble, in his view.  He was not molded to fit into a consumer-based economy.

I have an oil whetstone no. 21 (shown above) for which my father paid fifty cents, price marked in two places on the box.  In that day, fifty cents may well have been half-day's pay.  This same stone, new, is available yet today and can be purchased for about fifty dollars.  I think that that is 9900% increase in price.

A few days ago BBBH and I were working together on a project.  I got out my pocket knife to cut a string.  "That," she said, "is pathetic.  Sharpen your knife."  I promised I would.  Dad would have been appalled.  His little two-blade knife had been sharpened down to this (shown below) before he died.  The smaller blade is not much wider than the thickness.  Dad's knife is shown with mine for comparison.

I have a lot of sharpening to do, and little time left in which to do it.

If you doubt what I say about no one fixing anything anymore, and you are not handy yourself, just try to find someone to repair your item.  After much searching across three counties, I finally found a man who will repair one of our malfunctioning machines.  He has a back-alley shop, and he is 76 years old.
So yes, it is easier and cheaper to "throw away" whatever and get a new one.  How ridiculous.

Oh, and Dad did have a large collection of tools.  Some things did require the "right" tool.

Today is D-Day.  Never Forget!

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