A REMARKABLE HARVESTING MACHINE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVI, Issue 994, 28 November 1883, Page 5

A REMARKABLE HARVESTING MACHINE.

A very interesting and instructive letter on harvesting machinery in America, from the pen of Mr J. L. Dow, M.L.A., appears in the Melbourne " Leader." Amongst the machines described is a combination harvester, invented by Mr Thomas Powell, and which Mr Dow saw at woTk in the Stockton district, California. It is a remarkable machine. It reaps the grain, threshes it, cleans it, bags it, and throws it off in the shape of sewn up bags of cleaned grain fit for market. The machine is, in short, a large reaper, with a threshing machine and winnower attached. Instead of going- through the work of tying the grain into sheaves, afterwards to be carted, stacked, and threshed, the sheaving apparatus of the reaper and binder is displaced in favor of a small threshing machine cylinder, which receives the reaped grain, threshes it, separates the straw from the grain and chaff, and passes the latter into a winnower, from which it emerges down a spout with a double mouth, on the end of which two bags are hung. A man who stands on a small platform watches the spout, and as aoon as one bag is filled shifts a slide, which turns the grain into the other bag, and while the other is filling he goes, on sewing up the former. Having sewn it he lays it on a shelving platform, and when this has received three bags it tips over and delivers the bags in heaps of three along the side out of the track of the machine. The straw and chaff come out at the rear of the machine together, and fall upon a tilting platform, which upon accumulating & Certain quantity^ automatically tips. In this way the valuable straw, mixed with the chaff, headings, light grain and other debris from the threshing and winnowing portion of the ma-

chine, is deposited in heaps about the field, ready to be taken up conveniently on the farm waggon and conveyed to the stockyard or barn. Mr Dow rode on and thoroughly inspected these machines for several hours, and to use his own words, " to see it mowing down a 30-bushel per acre wheat crop at the rate of 20 acres a day, and turning it out perfectly cleaned for market, in eewnup bags, 18 something to wonder at j and the surprise is intensified when one is informed that 93 of these machines, varying in length of reaper knife from 10 to 17 feet, have been in effective operation throughout the State of California during the recent harvest."