Retired Farmer Creates Handy Innovations

Retired Farmer Creates Handy Innovations Retired farmer Brian Haubrich enjoyed planning and developing new ideas while he was still actively farming. Haubrich had a large shop with plenty of space for equipment repairs, but it was a curved-wall Quonset without straight surfaces to mount and hang his large assortment of tools. “Because of the curved walls, I didn’t have anywhere to keep my tools organized, so I had to come up with another solution,” he says. “I decided to build a type of tool ‘tree’ where everything could go, and I could just walk to a central spot in the shop to grab what I needed.” The tool tree was built with an old New Holland baler flywheel as its base. Haubrich attached a length of 2-in. square tubing as a support post and added what he needed around the center. “I had a lot of stuff around the shop, so I made some trays to hold the smaller tools and added hooks and mounts to hang all the bigger pieces,” he says. “It weighs over 1,000 lbs., and was just what I needed. I made five of them in total.” Another innovation involved Haubrich transforming an old Co-op 26-ft. swather into a draper header for his combine. After using it that way for over eight years, he decided to park it. Tired of walking around it in his yard, he then built a round bale hauler from the main beam. “I had my shop and nothing to do in it at the time, so I decided to turn this into a trailer as I needed something to haul my bales home from all over the countryside,” Haubrich says. The result was repurposing the old swather beam as the central part of a trailer that holds nine round bales. He added strong metal bale cradles and hooked them up to dump hydraulically. For the axles, he bought 6-bolt rims and 16-in. tires to support the lengthy load. “It’s heavy-duty and sitting in the back of my yard,” Haubrich says. “I might want to sell it if someone is interested, as I don’t need it anymore.” Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Brian Haubrich, Glenbain, Sask. S0N 0X0 (ph 306-264-3809).

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