Realistic Mini Combine Is A Big Hit At Parades

Realistic Mini Combine Is A Big Hit At Parades AG WORLD 26-4-23 Elvin Pritts' combine won't thresh grain, but it sure draws a crowd. Pritts, a retired Guide Rock, Nebraska, farmer, says when he quit milking cows and tending his beef herd, he turned to model farm toys to keep busy. He collects them and builds them. Several pieces he's made will be on display this summer at the National Farm Toy Museum in Dyersville, Iowa. To date, the largest "toy" Pritts has made is a scale model John Deere 55 combine. Built on an old Snapper riding mower, the ride-on combine has a cab, platform head, grain tank, working augers, and a straw chopper. "I'm busy most of the summer taking it to parades and farm shows," he says. Pritts and a friend cut down the cab from an old Baldwin-Gleaner combine and put it back together so it looks like a 55 combine cab. "It's just big enough for me to ride in," he says. He shaped the header from a couple of 30-gal. plastic barrels which he cut in half lengthwise and then pieced together, to make it about 5 ft. wide. He installed a small auger as a feederhouse auger. And above that, he added a reel that he fashioned out of wood, using strips of house siding as bats. The reel is ground driven, so it turns if the combine is moving. While the old drive wheels from the mower still power the combine, Pritts added dummy wheels in the right place to look like combine drive wheels. He built the grain tank and rear end of the combine out of plywood cut to look like a model 55 combine. Concealed inside the grain tank are two smaller steel tanks. Pritts added a clean grain elevator and auger to fill the grain tank. It's put together so grain flows into the top of the hopper and then into one of the hidden steel tanks, where it runs back into the elevator and is returned to the tank in a continuous cycle. There's about half a bushel of grain in this loop. A belt from the power take off that ran the mower deck powers the elevator. To make it look authentic, the unload auger on the grain tank is connected to the second, hidden grain storage bin on the model combine, which holds about 3 bu. of grain. A 12-volt motor runs the unload auger. Pritts built a miniature gravity flow wagon to go with the combine, using the cut down hopper from an old pull-type Baldwin combine. He mounted it on a lawn mower frame. "I bought the hopper 40 years ago and used it to store feed for my dairy cows," he says. Originally, a friend pulled the wagon with a lawn tractor and would position the wagon under the unload auger. Then Pritts would flip the switch on the auger motor and put a little grain into the wagon. "It was difficult to get the wagon positioned right, though, so I built a hitch on the combine and now I pull the wagon alongside the combine," he says. To make the combine even more realistic, he added a straw chopper and spreader, built from a squirrel cage fan salvaged from a car heater, with strips of rubber belting added on the bottom side. A second 12-volt motor runs this. Of course, a straw spreader needs something to spread, so Pritts put a length of 6-in. auger through the body of the combine, to empty onto the spreader. He packs the auger with sawdust prior to a parade. This motor has a gear reduction drive, allowing the auger to turn so slowly that he can leave it on for most of the time during parades. "It holds about 20 lbs. of sawdust, which is usually enough for most parades," he says. The weight of the model combine on the old lawnmower chassis was too much for the original 8 hp engine, so Pritts replaced it with an 11 hp Honda engine. The demands of the added 12-volt motors proved to be too much for the mower's electrical system, too. "The battery was usually so low after a parade that if I shut the motor off, there wasn't enough power to start it again," he says. To relieve some of that, he mounted another 12-volt battery inside the combine. A full charge on this battery is enough to power all the motors throughout a typical parade. Pritts added a radio to his c

To read the rest of this story, download this issue below or click here to register with your account number.