This ad from the May 1924 issue of The American Thresherman magazine shows us a glimpse of an important and little remembered industry. On a related note, pulley advertisements are also scattered through these old magazines. All that horsepower produced by steam engines had to be moved to the machines they ran, and flat belts were the method. An interesting thing I have noticed is how horse-power sweeps used tumbling rods to run threshers and other machines. They are the equivalent of power take off shafts today, but they were not used on steam engines when they came into common use. I guess one reason belts were used for threshing was to lessen the fire hazard of a steam engine near a straw stack; but it is odd to think that horses spun power take off shafts long before they reappeared on gasoline powered tractors.
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I wonder if the steam engines' power pulses were too much for the joints in the tumbling rods.
My grandfather used to hire a man and his 630 John Deere tractor to help with farming. The odd-fire nature of the the Johnny Popper knocked journals out of PTO shaft u-joints and bushings out of sickle bars on our New Holland mower-conditioner.
Tangentially related: We used to drive an elevator with the belt pulley of a WC Allis-Chalmers thru a speed-jack made from a car transmission to what could best be described as a tumbling rod. I learned respect for unguarded shafts at a very early age!
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