Way back when I was in junior high school, one of my buddies told me about a horrible accident that his grandfather had witnessed while working on a threshing crew. The threshing machine was an old model, covered with wood rather than sheet metal like the newer models, and a fellow was up on top of the machine for some reason; directly above the spinning cylinder that knocks the wheat out of the hulls and off the stalk. The wood that the fellow was standing on failed, and he dropped right into the machine onto the cylinder. If you take even a casual look at the thresher cylinder in the photo, you can see the result wasn't pretty. My friend's grandfather told him that you could literally see the blood drain out of the man's face.
The reason I bring up this unpleasant tale is that lots of people still run these old machines, and the old-timers aren't around anymore to pass on the knowledge they picked up the hard way. When you see someone in a potentially dangerous situation around old machinery, for Heaven's sake, speak up. You might save someone's life. Scroll the slider over to 2:45 on the video below, and note the fellow on top of the thresher. I bet he isn't even thinking about the spinning teeth just inches below his feet.
When I was a young Electrical Engineering student, we were given a no-nonsense lecture from one of our professors about all the ways that the big electrical motors we were going to work with could kill us stone dead.
ReplyDeleteDRT, in fact.
With me, it stuck.
I was raised around an Allis-Chalmers round baler and heard the story (many times) of the man from my home town who left tractor and baler running when he went to clear a hay jam.
ReplyDeleteHe was pulled into the machine and killed. His young son came out to bring him lunch and found him.
The son, a few years older than me, to this day bears the mental scars of that scene.
As a veterinarian's son, I often rode with Dad on calls and got to know the old farmers and was amazed by the number of missing fingers, hands, and arms on the ones who survived their machinery accidents.
Like Borepatch, those experiences stay with me.
I count off a half dozen neighbors who lost fingers or hands in "modern" combines. Or the one who lost his manhood to a PTO shaft and another who lost his life to an auger. I caught my wedding ring on a loader that was being raised (luckily didn't lose it or my finger.)
ReplyDeleteThe first rule on our farm was safety and the second was to have a plan when the first rule failed.
My dad grew up with the threshers and I'd know he saw his share up close. He was not kind if you violated the first rule.