But Armstrong’s efforts in Arizona on behalf of the 9320 would be wasted. As the very first 9320s started down the assembly line, combine production at White ground to a halt. The company declared bankruptcy. But it still had a very desirable asset: a marketable rotary combine.

How did that combine come to be — and what happened to it?

WHY IT MATTERS: This story of harvester research and development, much of which took place in secret here in Canada, shows how even the best ideas can fall victim to quirks of timing and circumstance.

New Holland would be the first to market a rotary combine, the TR70, in 1975 — but all farm machinery brands were working on and/or trying to develop the concept.

After the TR70 debuted, no longer was trying to create a rotary combine just an interesting R&D project for other brands. It became an urgent objective if they were to stay competitive in the harvester marketplace — and the clock was now ticking.

“The whole combine industry changed,” says Doug Voss, a former engineer with White, who worked through that period.

Engineers there had started White’s rotary development project back when the company was known as Cockshutt, long before that brand merged with U.S.-based Oliver and Minneapolis-Moline to form White Farm Equipment in the early 1960s.

“The rotary concept was the brainwave of Don McNeil, who was our chief engineer,” says Herb Hagglund, a former field engineer at White’s Cockshutt facility at Brantford, Ont. “He came from Massey. He and another fellow at Massey — who ended up at International — had tossed the idea around before he came to us at Cockshutt in 1953 or ’54. We started this thing (the rotary development project) in September of 1966.”

Given that IH started a rotary project about the same time, it’s interesting to speculate whether the other engineer from Massey-Harris-Ferguson who went to IH had a hand in that.

The garage band

Once White’s rotary development project was approved, all work on it became top secret — so secret, in fact, the small staff assigned to work on it was moved out of the company’s main engineering facility to a rented workshop. That kept the project as invisible as possible.

“They rented what was originally an Esso service station,” remembers Hagglund. “It had two bays and a bit of an office. We just had the barest of essentials as far as fabrication is concerned. I was in charge of the overall project at that time.”

To help Hagglund, two fabricators and a draftsman were pulled from the main engineering section to make up the team working out of the old service station. A service trailer loaded with tools, used by engineers for field repairs, was hauled up to the garage to give the small crew access to welders and a variety of other essentials.

Although they were essentially working on their own, the team was also getting some R&D support from the Ontario Research Foundation (ORF), which was funded jointly by an industry association and government grants. It helped the small, garage-based research team by doing some testing and development in its lab.

Roy Gullickson, a combine engineer, was recruited away from Massey Ferguson by the ORF to bring expertise in harvester design to its staff. And he was given the job of heading ORF’s efforts on the rotary development project.

“The ORF was involved in a contract with Cockshutt (White) Farm Equipment to take a look the possibilities of having a combine harvester more suited to corn and soybeans, but also suited to cereal grains and oilseeds,” he explains. “That sounded interesting to me.”

To begin evaluating potential rotor designs, long before NH introduced the TR70, Gullickson took a look at the only existing rotary technology on the market at that time, used in stationary corn shellers.

“We bought a small, stationary corn thresher you could drive with the belt pulley of a tractor and you could shovel corn ears into it,” he continues. “The rotor itself was only about six or eight inches in diameter. We did quite a bit of testing on kernel damage and threshing efficiency in a lab that was set up for that purpose in the ORF building.”

Playing by ear

To have corn on hand for testing year-round meant the team members had to leave their workshops, go out into cornfields and hand-pick ears for their stockpile.

“We gathered corn ears in the field,” Gullickson says. “The guys from Cockshutt helped with that and we put the ears into cold storage until we were ready to use them.”

Because he’d contributed so much to the overall project, management at White decided to bring Gullickson into its own fold. He was hired away from the ORF to be a full-time member of the rotary development team.

“Roy worked on the (rotary) concept for about three years before he came to us, and then we moved everything into our own facilities,” Hagglund says. “That became our basic crew: two fabricators, a draftsman, Roy and myself.”

As work continued, accommodations in the old service station were becoming cramped. Development of the rotary moved beyond building and operating stationary test rigs to creating a field-scale prototype.

“We were in touch with Cockshutt all the time and Don McNeil, who was chief engineer and vice-president of engineering at the time,” says Gullickson. “He decided he wanted to do a full-size test rig. We did that at Cockshutt using a conventional harvester. In 1967 we took the cylinder, beater and straw walker out of it.” That prototype became known as the R1.

“We brought up a 535 (combine), which was a production machine,” Hagglund recalls. “We brought it up and stripped it out, took everything out of the inside. All we had left was a frame, drivetrain and engine. We took what Roy came up with, the thresher and separator part, and fabricated it in our shop. We used part of our central engineering facility to make parts.” The new rotary thresher and separation system were then installed into the 535.

But even though the team had to work on the prototype outside of its old service-station workshop, the company still wanted to keep a veil of secrecy over its progress.

“One of the contractors we had to make parts was making the rotor, which was fairly substantial and heavy,” says Hagglund. “He asked us what we were making, and I told him it was a cement mixer.”

To make for a simple installation, the rotor was attached directly to the feeder house. When the header was raised, the rotor tilted in unison with it. The pivot point between the feeder house and rotor was the 535’s existing feeder house mounts. There was no threshing advantage to this arrangement, it just made converting the combine to a rotary thresher a simpler process.

“We tied the corn head to the threshing and separating part,” says Hagglund. “It pivoted on a central pivot. That’s how we got the corn head to move up and down. We took it out into the field in mid-January to do corn.”

“The first rotor was about 24 inches in diameter,” says Gullickson. “It ran from one end of the combine to the other.”

Field goals

By the beginning of January the improvised prototype was ready for its first field trial, after being fitted with a two-row Oliver corn head.

But the team had been working on much more than just moving from a conventional, tangential threshing cylinder to an axial rotary design: the initial R1 prototype also included an entirely new vertical cleaning system. Grain was lifted up inside the combine body and fell through an upward airflow inside a rotating chamber that used centrifugal force to improve cleaning.

“The overall idea was we were trying to make a machine that was cheaper and easier to manufacture, because it had less parts,” Hagglund says. “By going vertical with the cleaning unit, we could harvest uphill, downhill or sidehill without any detriment to the cleaning.”

The method initially used to get material into the rotor was unconventional as well. “We started off with an air fan feeding material from the table to the rotor, but that didn’t work out well,” remembers Gullickson. “But the results doing corn, as I recall, were fairly satisfactory overall. So we decided to do a new combine design with the rotor part of the fixed structure of the combine.”

After the initial work in the field with corn, the engineers decided the second-generation prototype needed to be tested in cereal grains as well. To make the necessary changes to the prototype for that, White rented another, larger building in Brantford, and the small team moved from the old service station to the much bigger accommodations.

“We moved three times in the space of two years,” says Hagglund. “We didn’t allow anybody in unless they definitely had some reason for being there. We tried to keep it as quiet as we could.”

With the changeover to a grain header and the rotor fixed in place so it no longer moved in conjunction with the feeder house, the remodelled prototype, now designated the R1A, was ready for field work by mid-May of 1967. Then the team hit the road to Crystal City, Texas, to start field trials in cereal grains. Oats was the first small grain to be put through it. In 1968 another updated prototype, the R2A, was built on the 535 chassis and field tested.

Once the modified 535 combine had served its purpose as an initial test bed, it was time for a ground-up build to incorporate new and better design elements. Working out of its third rented location, the engineering team created an entirely new combine prototype in 1969. Designated the DE-1, it threshed with a 24-inch diameter rotor, took power from a Chrysler 440, V-8 engine connected to a hydrostatic traction drive and relied on a variable-speed belt to drive the rotor.

“The DE-1 was a totally new concept from the ground up,” says Hagglund. “Everything was built by hand.” By 1970 it was in the field.

The vertical cleaning system was also built into the initial DE-1 prototype, along with the rotary threshing system — but because the vertical cleaning system’s design had so many problems, it was eventually abandoned in favour of a conventional one. “We kept working on it,” says Hagglund. “The big problem with it was to make it adjustable and have it convenient to adjust. Cleaning is a very complicated game.”

Despite the fact the rotary team was making good progress, financial concerns at White necessitated belt-tightening measures that disbanded it in 1971. Both Hagglund and Gullickson left the company as a result. “People went in all different directions,” Hagglund remembers.

Regrouping

About a year later, management at White managed to stabilize the company’s finances and reallocate enough funding to the engineering department to restart the rotary project. But with the original engineers Hagglund and Gullickson gone, replacements had to come from the remaining staff.

Murray Mills was one of those selected to pick up where Hagglund and Gullickson left off. “I was working mostly on the conventional combines at that time,” Mills recalls. “We had the two groups within the combine engineering department, the small group on the rotary, originally, and the full-scale development on the conventional side as well.”

With new hands on the project, the top-secret approach gave way to a more inclusive effort after the restart in the early 1970s. “We started sharing (the work),” says Mills. “The way White’s engineering was at that time was there was an engineer in charge of engines, one in charge of frames and that sort of thing. There would be one engineer in charge of that (rotary) project, but he would have access to engineers in all the other groups.” That meant development of the rotary was now very much the combined efforts of the whole group of engineers.

That group did, however, reap the benefits of the major accomplishments from Hagglund and Gullickson: mainly, how they overcame much of the difficulty encountered in getting tough crop to feed into the rotor properly — a problem that lingered with the other brands’ designs, even after they began commercial production.

The secret to the White design was to add a beater in front of the rotor inlet to accelerate the speed of the crop mat as it came out of the feeder house — a system for which John Deere eventually purchased the patent, Mills says, and continued using a version of it on its combines.

Room for improvements

Once the NH and IH rotary combines hit the market, White’s engineering staff wanted to take a look at those designs, so the company purchased one of the first IH rotary combines and leased a NH to evaluate their performance.

Getting material to feed into the rotor and getting good straw distribution at the back of the combines were two areas where White engineers saw they could improve over those designs. Fortunately, they already knew how to get tough crop to feed in, thanks to Hagglund and Gullickson.

“Probably the two biggest things were the feeding and then the discharge from the rear end to make sure you get even distribution,” says Mills. “We changed the shape of the discharge at the back to get a decent spread of the material.”

The White engineers “developed a computer model and did a lot of work on the design of the rotor,” he says. “They were trying to move material with the rotor rather than with the guide vanes. It was almost like an auger, moving material with the rotor. That was never very satisfactory in a lot of crops. It was when they developed the guide vanes that things really started to look good. The original rotor looked like an auger with threshing elements on it.”

The computer modelling and the evaluations of competitors’ machines provided new insight for refinements to the rotor design.

“When New Holland introduced their rotary, it changed the direction we were going in, substantially,” says Voss. “We were working on an auger-flighting concept for a rotor. NH introduced longitudinal-type elements on the rotor and helical guide vanes.” The team at White realized it had to go in a similar direction as well.

With the final engineering obstacles overcome on the rotor, engineers were getting close to a marketable design — and that pleased White’s management, who saw rotaries as the way of the future. Even though a large, conventional prototype combine with a 60-inch cylinder, the model 9800, was nearly ready for production, management decided to abandon it. The weight of importance had shifted from conventional combine development to rotary.

“The decision was made to go with the rotary rather than a big conventional,” Mills remembers. “That basically stopped all development work on the big conventional under development at the time, because it was thought at that time that (the rotary) was the way things were going to go.”

“The original objective of the (rotary) project was to come up with a high-capacity combine, using technology that was different than what had been in use at that time.” adds Voss. “As a result it was a very demanding and huge project.”

Conventional cleaning

Another of the engineering casualties was the vertical cleaning system pioneered by Hagglund and Gullickson. “They had the idea they could go rotary on everything,” says Mills. “The cleaning system they were using was basically rotary as well. It was a vertical drum that was rotating. They tried to use centrifugal force to separate out the chaff. You could develop it to work well in one crop. The problem was, you couldn’t adjust it to change between crops. Screens on the vertical sections had to be changed. You couldn’t use the same screens in corn and wheat.”

So, the first White rotary combine would have to borrow its cleaning system design from the conventional models.

“There was a lot of energy expended on developing the new cleaning system,” recalls Voss. “We had to stop that when NH came out with the TR70. In hindsight, I think it slowed down the rotary development. It was too large a task for the number of people involved and the size of the department.

The first high-capacity prototype to be built using the modified rotor design combined with a conventional cleaning system was the HC-1. The rotor in the HC-1 was larger than previous prototypes, it grew to 80 cm in diameter and its length was extended. It was also the first prototype to use a rotor incorporating guide vane technology.

After further refinements, the HC-1 prototype morphed into the HC-2, which became the production version of the 9700. There were other HC prototypes as well. The HC-4 would become the smaller-framed 9320.

When all the research work was done and the threshing system design was market-ready, White originally intended to create three different-sized, self-propelled machines. The largest model, the class VI, 9700, would be built with the 80-cm, long-length rotor. A mid-sized, class-V 9400 (which was to get the designation 9520 for production) would get a smaller-diameter rotor the same length as the 9700s. And the 9100 (which would form the basis of the production 9320) was to get a shorter, 70-cm diameter rotor.

“We built two or three 9400s,” says Mills. “They were built experimentally but never put into production. There was nothing significant about it (in performance over the 9320) to give it any advantage. It shared the same body as the 9320. The 9320 was the simplest design. It had the fewest drive assemblies.”

Concluded and rebooted

In 1979 White began rotary combine production in Brantford, starting with the 9700. After some initial “clean-up” refinements, the 9700 was renumbered the 9720 in 1984.

But the financial situation for farm machinery manufacturers had become very difficult by the end of the 1970s. Low commodity prices and declining farm incomes in North America led to a sudden and significant drop in demand for combines.

White was placed in bankruptcy protection in September of 1980 and ceased operations five years later. The very first 9320s were just starting down the assembly line the day production was stopped.

Massey Ferguson purchased the White rotary designs from the bankruptcy receiver, giving it ownership of all the completed 9720s, any incomplete models on the assembly line including the 9320s, the parts stores and all the tooling required to build them.

Production of the 9700s then moved across Brantford to the MF facility. The 9320 Whites eventually made it all the way down the assembly line there wearing MF 8560 decals, while the larger 9700s were rebadged as the MF 8590.

Eleven years after serious engineering work began on creating a rotary combine at White, engineers finally saw their efforts begin to pay off with the model 9700s, which had the largest capacity of any rotary machine on the North American market when they entered production in 1979.

Unfortunately, the company would not last long enough to gain the full benefit of the efforts its engineers put into creating the new machines.

“For its time, the 9700 was a good combine,” Voss says. “It kind of pioneered the high-capacity direction machines have been forced to go in.”

The post Right stuff, wrong time: How a team in Ontario developed the highest-capacity rotary combine of its day appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Charles Hefford Jr. was the son of Charles Hefford, who was an early resident of the Miami area. Charles’ father was a boat captain on the Great Lakes who drowned in Lake Superior during a storm. Charles’ mother remarried and with her new husband and family moved to Nelsonville, Manitoba.

In 1877, Charles homesteaded 19-4-6W1. In 1883, Charles married Jane Montgomery and began a family. Charles and Jane later sold this homestead and moved into Miami, however, in 1892 they purchased part of 2-5-7W1 which they farmed until 1921 when they retired to Miami.

Charles Jr. homesteaded near Oak Point, Manitoba where two of his brothers, Arthur and Bart, also homesteaded. Charles looked after his brothers’ farms while Arthur and Bart served in the First World War. After the war ended, Charles sold his farm and returned to the Miami area where he worked for a while as a weed inspector in the area attempting to control leafy spurge. Arthur and Bart also returned to the Miami area where they farmed for a number of years. Charles Jr. passed away in 1968.

The advent of plowing with steam engines posed significant problems as the first plows used behind an engine were adopted from animal traction plows. As these plows featured three bottoms at most and usually less than that, most engines had the power to draw multiple plows. How to hook all these plows together and keep them properly trailing behind the engine was a problem. As well, the engines often caused the plow frames to fail. The Cockshutt Plow Company recognized the problems and set out to design plows specifically for steam engines. In 1903, Cockshutt introduced heavy-duty three- and four-bottom plows suitable for mechanical traction. If a farmer needed a plow larger than three or four bottoms, the farmer could hook two or three of the Cockshutt units together by using what Cockshutt called a “jockey rod.” However, an operator was needed on each unit to work the levers to raise and lower the bottoms.

Cockshutt then introduced another new plow designed for mechanical traction, the engine gang plow. This design was soon successful and was copied by other manufacturers despite the Cockshutt patent on the design. The Cockshutt design featured a single frame and required only one operator. Cockshutt built a number of models of this design, with each model having a different number of bottoms. All models used identical mouldboard assemblies attached side by side across the angled rear of the frame. Each mouldboard assembly was a plow in itself and was hinged to the frame. Each assembly had its own depth gauge wheel, allowing individual mouldboards to float and follow the contour of the ground. As these assemblies were identical, if one was damaged the plow man could easily remove two hinge pins to remove the damaged assembly, take a complete assembly off the outward end of the plow to replace the damaged assembly and continue plowing.

The Avery Company, which built a popular line of steam engines, realized its engines were frequently paired with Cockshutt engine gang plows and convinced Cockshutt to sell Avery the sole distribution rights for the Cockshutt engine gang plow in the U.S., Mexico and Cuba. Avery sold the engine gang plows under the label of Cockshutt-Avery. When the Cockshutt patents on the engine gang plow design ran out, Avery began building the plow directly.

Avery made a significant improvement to the Cockshutt engine gang plow design with the development of a power lift system. This system was made available to Cockshutt and was fitted to both Avery and Cockshutt plows. This system allowed the tractor operator to raise and lower the plow from the tractor and did away with the operator on the plow.

It appears that with a number of gas plowing outfits, the tractor operator was also required to work the levers lifting and lowering the plow. This required the tractor operator to cross back and forth between the tractor and plow while the outfit was in motion. Turning the outfit at the end of the field would have been quite a gymnastic feat between crossing back and forth to steer the tractor while lifting and lowering the bottoms. The auto lift allowed the operator to remain steering while simply pulling, when necessary, on the rope controlling the auto lift mechanism.

The five-bottom Cockshutt plow in the collection has the auto lift fitted to it. The plow when donated came with a set of breaking bottoms for the plow in addition to the wheat land bottoms that are fitted to the plow. Breaking bottoms have quite a different shape to them in comparison to wheat land bottoms as they are longer and narrower.

This plow also demonstrates the evolution of Cockshutt design as this plow is fitted with a breakaway feature to prevent damage in case a bottom hit an obstruction. This simply consisted of a three-quarter-inch-diameter wood dowel that broke at a certain pressure. So if a bottom hit a large stone or some other obstruction, the dowel would break before some part of the plow did and let the bottom swing upwards to clear the obstruction.

The plow bottom was fastened to the main plow beams by a C-shaped short beam section which is held to the main beams by a bolt with the wooden dowel ahead of the bolt. When the dowel broke, the bolt acted as a pivot point allowing the bottom to swing upwards. The bottom could then be dropped back in position by the farmer, a replacement dowel inserted into the mechanism and plowing resumed. Previous Cockshutt plow designs did not have this feature, which led to damage being suffered at times by these designs.

The post The Cockshutt five-bottom auto lift engine gang plow appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

However, there were downsides. Producers had to have sufficient grain of one type and grade to load a car. While they could in theory load different grades into a boxcar, this meant “bulkheads” or walls had to be built to divide it into different compartments. As well as bearing the expense of the lumber, the producer had to pay for the increased loading expenses. Railways disliked bulkheading as it resulted in damage to the wooden sides of the car, and it appears not to have been common.

Other downsides included complicated damage claims in the case of leaks and potential demurrage charges if the car was slow to unload at port.

Once the car was loaded and ready to ship to a terminal, grain companies or grain dealers could offer to pay “track” price before the car even left the point. Track price was usually higher than street price as the grain companies or dealers knew the grain was loaded on a car and ready to move to port or wherever the customer wanted it.

Grain cars moving to port were sampled at Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton and the samples graded while the car moved to port. As the car passed these points and was sampled and graded, the producer could then be offered a “billed and inspected” price by grain companies or grain dealers. Billed and inspected price was higher than track price as the grade and volume of grain was known, plus the grain was closer to port than where it originated.

When the grain was unloaded and weighed into a port terminal, the producer could then be offered a “spot” price. Spot prices were higher than billed and inspected price as the grain was at port ready to be loaded onto a vessel.

The “street” price for grain was usually the lowest price available, making loading a producer car attractive.

The farmers could and did use commission agents and the commission houses of grain companies to assist with producer cars. These agents and organizations would act as agents of the farmer in disputes over grade and weights, or arrange storage and sale at port.

Many wagon loads

Against the benefits, the producer would have to consider the problems in loading a rail car at the time. Depending on the car supplied the producer would need approximately 1,800 bushels. The railways during the fall “grain rush” only allowed 24 hours for loading. Considering the average grain wagon could haul at most 100 bushels then seven or eight trips would be needed.

Obtaining a producer car was fairly simple. Each railway station had to maintain a car order book in which everyone wanting a car filled out a page. Cars were allocated on the strict order the pages were filled out. Producers were restricted to having one car on order and grain elevators to two. The railways operated a car distribution system which allocated cars on the basis of demand. At the time, railways operated two to three trains a week on most branch lines.

‘Public’ terminals

Several important factors facilitated the use of producer cars. Until the 1920s, most terminals were not owned by grain companies. They were “public” terminals and accepted any grain offered. They simply handled and stored grain. This situation began to change in the 1920s and many terminals became semi-public, handling grain owned by their company as well as handling others.

There was also a “no-mixing” rule. By 1930 this rule had evolved and was only applicable to the top grades of wheat. Once a load had a grade of No. 3 Northern or higher assigned to it, no other grades of wheat were allowed to be blended with it, either at the elevator or at the port. Wheat grading No. 3 or higher arriving at port was forwarded to whatever terminal had space, regardless of who owned the grain. Rather than actual ownership, the shipper received a warehouse receipt, which was a recognized financial instrument. The owners could deposit warehouse receipts with the Port Shippers Clearance Association and in return receive a Shippers Certificate which could be sold if the owner wanted to ship grain. When the vessel arrived, the clearance association assigned the vessel to whichever terminal had the necessary grade.

The no-mixing rule meant that at least for the top grades of wheat the ports were relatively fluid and shipping into a port one of the top grades of wheat using a producer car was fairly easy.

However, using a producer car to move wheat grading No. 4 or lower was more of a problem. The car had to be directed to a particular terminal to be unloaded with an agreement for handling to be arranged beforehand. Demurrage could be charged if the car had to wait for space to be unloaded.

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The issue featured extensive coverage of addresses to the International Wheat Pool conference in Kansas City, including speeches by the presidents of the three Prairie wheat Pools, Alberta Premier and former UGG director J.E. Brownlee, the U.S. secretary of agriculture and a representative of a Russian grain export firm.

“The Pool Woman” page in that issue featured a photo of Mrs. Ellen Foss of Stonewall, who had shipped the first carload of wheat to Manitoba Pool in September 1924.

On the co-operative livestock-marketing front, cattle supplies were said to be short, with strong prices in recent weeks. “So pronounced is the scarcity of supply that the vanishing of overseas cattle to Britain has made no difference. By the end of May last year 40,000 cattle had been exported to Great Britain. Latest figures this year record only 7,100 shipped, and it is doubtful if it will reach 8,000 by the end of May.”

Cattle were instead heading west, and United Livestock Growers was shipping slaughter cattle from Winnipeg to Calgary and the Pacific Coast.

In the U.S., the government had introduced a new grade called “U.S. Prime Steer,” along with an educational program to “teach consumers that good beef is more desirable than poor beef.”

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Our front page that week had a photo of a flooded field with a cutline of “early thaws caught many by surprise.” There were no other references to weather but a story in the next issue said no flooding was expected on the Red and Assiniboine.

Elsewhere we reported on toughened regulations to control cheating the provincial beef stabilization plan. There were higher payments for yearlings, leading to “mistakes” in reporting the age of calves, as well as higher payments for steers. One producer had reported marketings of 140 per cent of his registered herd, which were all steers. “Everyone wanted to see the bull that could perform such a feat,” said the marketing manager of the Manitoba Beef Commission.

The Manitoba Farm Bureau was on its way to final dissolution — on March 8 we reported that Federated Co-operatives had withdrawn, following the earlier departure of Manitoba Pool and UGG. Interim head Bert Hall had met with Agriculture Minister Sam Uskiw to ask for support to implement a new organization with direct farmer membership, and Uskiw had asked for evidence of support.

The post White Farm Equipment was “here to stay” appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.