I am posting this for Charles, anyone out there have any good pictures you could send him or specs on an early Reaper/Binder?
Country: UnitedKingdom
Email:
the.weagers@ntlworld.com
Comments: Hi all, I am looking for help. I am a railway modeller from the UK and I would like to model a "typical" reaper/binder from the period 1900 to 1940 to OO (1:76) scale for my club layout. What would help me are scale drawings and detail photographs. My Reason:- for twenty years I lived in a village just outside Taunton in the English West country. There were many wheat fields in the vicinity and around many of the villages to the south. When the wheat was ripe it was mown using a McCormick type reaper binder and romantically stacked into wheat sheafs. I have seen one in red so I have assumed that it is a Massey. On the way to work I used to cycle past an old farm. In the October they would get out a threshing machine to separate the chaff. Threshing machines are valuable, two were stored in the corner of a field under tarpaulin close by. When one was destroyed by fire it was a local calamity, hopefully these two are still safe. Why use such ancient equipment I hear you ask? The reaper is a gentle machine as is the thresher and the resultant wheat stalk ( now called reed) is ideal for roofing. So why change. I left the area 20 years ago and now I see that the fields have now been used for housing. I expect they are still using the same old methods in villages further away from the encroaching town. I hope this is of interest to you. Thank you Charles Weager