I didn't know they still made and sold these!

[sodamo]

Reminds me of something we had when I was growing up...

My Dad got some sosrt of 2 wheel, walk behind tractor. Wide handle bars kinda like a bicycle with a throttle cable near one hand and 2 lever in the middle, 1 to engage the drive belt, 2nd to engage the power take off belt. It had a couple of attachments including a saw that mounted on the front. About a 20 inch blade as I recall and no safety stuff at all. Run in the horizontal position you could fell a tree. Vertically, you could cut logs into lengths by lowering blade into the log. Same technique with some side to side and back and forth would grind out the stump. There was also a stand so you could feed the wood into the blade.
Cut a lot of dirt so learned how to file the teeth rather often. Was a mixed blessing when Dad finally got a chainsaw, it was one of those that weighed like 30 pounds.

Dad converted to oil furnace after my next 2 brothers and I left home, seems my younger siblings got shortchanged growing up. :laughing:

 

[R W]

Kind of like this one? This was run from a belt off a Farmall C. Circa 1953, Check out the safety guard on that blade. Eat your heart out, OSHA. :laughing:

Cut firewood for about 15 years with a saw similar to this one, drove it with a
LA Case.
The are only as Safe/Dangerous as the the the people using them

 

[Carykong]

picker77---great old family pictures. Just curioius. What state were these pictures taken in? Would you know what kind of shingles were on the sheds shown in the pictures? When my great uncle transistioned from mules to a Farmall in the early 40s,he was totally delighted that he would be able to get out in the fields for an extra 10 years.

 

[picker77]

picker77---great old family pictures. Just curioius. What state were these pictures taken in? Would you know what kind of shingles were on the sheds shown in the pictures?

Oklahoma, about 40 miles SW of Tulsa. Left to right are main house, wash house (with the cellar door open by rope and pulley), and smokehouse. All built the same year, some time in the late 20's. The shingles are all cedar shake, don't know know if they were locally cut, probably not. As for the sheds in the winter picture, the small one is the outhouse, the other is one end of the long chicken house, which it was my pleasure to swamp out on occasion in the summers. Roofs on all outbuildings were also cedar shake.

This was an 80-acre "truck farm" plus a few cows and hogs for meat. I was a city boy from a fair-sized nearby town of about 5000 (now only about 2000), and spent my summers on this farm because that's where I wanted to be. Rode into area towns with Granddad every Saturday morning in his '37 Dodge pickup (pictured below with him and my pretty Aunt when I was -2 years old), hauling eggs, bushel baskets of cantaloupes, watermelons, string beans, summer squash, egg plant, and other cash crops to the local grocery stores. He put two girls through college with those trips. In the early 50's they drilled an oil well on his place (later converted to a gas well, which I still own a share of) and he got indoor plumbing and a new tractor as a result. He still farmed 12 hours a day, though.

I wouldn't trade those summers for all of Bill Gates' money, either!

 

[Elkins45]

Wow, your Aunt was quite the looker!

 

[picker77]

Yes, she was, it runs in the family--I'm quite a handsome guy myself. :laughing:

It occurs to me I should apologize to Clemsonfor and others for hijacking this thread with all this nostalgia stuff. I'm nearing 70 and sometimes get to thinking about the good 'ol days and get carried away. It's a malady that comes on you at my age, I guess.

 

[tglass]

Didn't know they still sold them either. Not any more dangerous than a table saw or alot of things we take for granted and use every day at work and at home. Just larger, but with the same basic result if safety is not followed.

 

[beenthere]

Yes, she was, it runs in the family--I'm quite a handsome guy myself. :laughing:

It occurs to me I should apologize to Clemsonfor and others for hijacking this thread with all this nostalgia stuff. I'm nearing 70 and sometimes get to thinking about the good 'ol days and get carried away. It's a malady that comes on you at my age, I guess.

Nice age.
If you were 2 in '39, than you might be past the 70 marker.

 

[Rob-D]

Don't get to misty eyes about the past guys as Dickens' wrote,"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".

We're all sitting here on computers, with nice tractors, etc. This is the world mankind wants, if it wasn't it would be different. If you want to go back to the past, shut off your electricity, with all the conveniences like your fridge, washing machine, TV with Monday night football, your oil burner that keeps your house warm and all the rest of it and tell me how long you want to go on living that way. While you're at it throw away penicillin.

There were some nice things about the past but there was a lot of terrible stuff too! I remember people getting cancer from cleaning parts with benzene because no one knew any better, what part of that do you want to go back to? How about ten year old kids working in sweat shops? Bread lines, Polio?

my two cents,

Rob

 

[Grateful11]

>"I'll admit I still like my Husqvarna 372XP, though, and no doubt if one of them had been available in the 40's or 50's it would have been used! "

Why would they not have used it? That's like saying, "I plow with an Ox you
can keep that tractor". Chainsaws were coming onto the scene in the 40's and 50's.