NOTE: YOU CAN SEE THIS MACHINE IN OPERATION THIS WEEK END AT THE ANCASTER FAIR
FROM SEPTEMBER 21 TO SEPTEMER 25, 2023. DOMINIC MAY BE PRESENT. DO NOT DISTRACT HIM,
HE HAS IMPORTANT WORK TO DO.
EPISODE 880: ROBERT DOWNEY’S 1920 OR 1930 CORN COB SHUCKER…FEATURING 7 YEAR OLD DOMINIC DEBOER
alan skeoch
Sept. 18, 2023
Dominic DeBoer was a busy little boy, perhaps 7 years old. Dominic and his dad Joe DeBoer were very busy feeding cornstalks from
a farm wagon to Colin Fearman and Colin Tomlinson who were operating the McCormick Deerng Corn Shucker. A weird and wonderful
machine designed to shred corn stalks and shuck corn cobs onto a conveyor belt.
Dominic took the job very seriously. No time for small talk. The corn thresher was alive and a touch dangerous for a little boy lest his
hand got ingested. So Dominic took one stalk at a time and pitched it into the mouth of the machine. And what a beautiful machine it is.
How can I describe the shredder and chucker? The image of a rusty octopus comes to mind. An octopus with three long legs of
varying length. The longest is the endless power belt….that hooks the tractor to the shredder. There is danger here so Colin and Dale
and Robert keep a close eye lest someone gets too close. People can lose an arm is they are stupid enough to touch the belt.
The other arms of the shredder are busy … one arm blows the shredded corn stalks into a pile in the field while the shortest arm
moves the clean cobs to a corn crib. Inside the octopus (i.e. shredder) razor sharp blades rip off the husks and chew the stalks into
bit sized chunjs,
Dominic never let his hands get close to the shredder. With two hands he hurled his con stalk into the mouth of the shredder….one
stalk at time while his dad hurled in a pile of stalks/
I had never seen a machine like this. And I hadd documented most farm machines The years fro 1850 to 1891 were great years
for mechanical investors. One invention paved the way to outher inventions. Hand operated corn sellers were common nachines
on 19th and 2th century hundred acre farms. But for shuckers and shredders were not common for goof reason. They
cost too much…$1600* ($29,000 today) …for farmers in those lean years of the late 1920’s and the Depression years of the 1930’s.
Far better to shuck corn by hand. Cheaper.
So this McComick Deering shucker is a rare find.
Enter Robert Downey, 38 year old mechanic who fell involve with ancient machines while working with his granddad when
his peers were more interested in cars, sports, clothes or drinking beer.
“How did you get interested in the old machines. diverting many of them from scrap yards ?”
I am 38 years old, born and raised just south of Caledonia, where I still reside. I am a licensed mechanic by trade and currently working at the Hamilton Airport fixing ground service equipment. I also do some farming and help Leanne’s family with the 4000 or so acres they do. I started working on things at a young age in my grandfather’s shop, Allan McBay, who was a Skid-Doo dealer, ag mechanic and farmer. I would spend all of my holidays and summers there working on equipment. At the time of his death, we counted all of the tractors, not including equipment and there were roughly 160 tractors. I got the “old iron bug” from him. Lol. All the way through high school my friends could not understand why I was always spending time at grandpas until one day they came up and took a tour through the barns, after that they understood and a few of them caught the “bug” themselves. I bought my first tractor, a 1949 Farmall H, when I was 17 and the first thing I did was take it to grandpas to get his seal of approval. After that it was just a tradition to get his seal of approval on all our tractors purchases. I was fortunate enough to end up with a farm girl who also caught the bug for old iron and she has since started collecting her own, however like Hatfield’s and McCoys, we have our fun battles as I come from an International Harvester family and she is a John Deere family. It is all in good fun, but at the end of the day we love all the old iron. We have a vast number of plows that we use in the fall to do plow days, the corn shredder, a corn binder, an old new holland baler with a mounted 2-cylinder Wisconsin engine and a few IH fast hitch attachments. My current project I have been working on is a 1976 IH Loadstar truck that I have put onto a newer truck chassis and plan on using to haul the old iron around on. I was also just lucky enough to retrieve my grandpa Downey’s 1947 International KB3 truck that will be on the restore list next.Between Leanne, Dale, Colin, Joe, Dominic and myself we are pushing in the neighbourhood of 50 tractors in our little collection. the oldest being my 1938 McCormick Deering 10-20 on steel and the newest being my 1960 Farmall 560 diesel that I still do farm work with.
What is the buying power of $1600 in 1930?
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$1,600 in 1930 has the same “purchasing power” or “buying power” as $29,064.72 in 2023. To get the total inflation rate for the 93 years between 1930 and 2023, we use the following formula: The average inflation rate of 3.17% has a compounding effect between 1930 and 2023
POST SCRPT: IT is easy for me to identify with Robert Downey even though I am 85 and he is 38. We share the same illines….OLD IRON.
He is the better man though. He is a mechanic. Whereas I am left handed and therefore handicapped since the world of machines is designed
for right handed people. I have other flaws. Optimism being one of them. Long ago when I was 38 I attended the Thompson farm sale near Cambridge.
There were five threshing machines in the sale. I bought them all rather than see them scrapped. Stupid thing to do. These machines need flat bed
trucks to move them so I hired Gordon Hume to help me do so. Two I gave to museums. One I sold at auction and the remainder are tucked away.
Marjorie did not criticize my foolishness.
she knows my illness is incurable. Robert Downey would have done the same.
One good result was that the largest of the threshers was accepted by Riverdale Farm in the heart of Toronto and when Godeon Hume moved up Palriament Street
with the behemoth, David Shatsky, then host of Radio Noon, happened to notice. He was curious. And his curiosity led to my decade long ‘CBC radio
career. I was able to become a radio journalist delivering 5 to 10 minute stories to a radio audience. Left anded people are often dreamers…story tellers.
But they are not mechanics. Love the romance of the corn shucker but I could never do what Robert has done.
I have the wreck of a corn binder on our farm. “Robert, if you are listening, I will give it to you as a parts machine if you want it. It is a pathetic pile of old iron
in our red pine forest. Think twice before you accept tis offer.”
alan