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.
