Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1545857
draper life may be low -- approximately 250 hours. Outer draper life should be 1,000-hour range if adjusted to track right, could be as little as 100 hours misaligned. Trouble feeding down, green, tangled crop. Flighting more aggressive, will tear tangled crop apart. More drives -- three drapers plus one beater in place of one auger. Header is deeper cutterbar to back of truss -- harder to slide into grain truck. Questions to be resolved about performance in milo, sunflowers, soybeans, etc. Drapers cannot be reversed with hydraulic draper drive. Negative customer attitude stated sliding onto the drapers (short crop, down and tangled). Second, the beater supports blocked heads feeding along the back of the header and twisted stalks so they fed sideways or butt first. Roger and I redesigned the supports but decided not to put the change into hardware after weighing what we would gain from further testing at this time vs. effort expended. Third, the drives never were reliable despite all our redesign and rebuilding. Roger also said the center draper was running at a much higher speed than on anything they had ever run before. I felt the header was in no condition to leave with one of our custom harvesters, so we decided to return it to MacDon in Winnipeg for modification and possible testing in Canada. (Later, we heard MacDon modified the header to fit on a White rotary and tested it in the Winnipeg area during late August and early September.) Continued from Page 37 Problems noted In 1936, our pastures were ruined from the drought years. Dad was trying to plow with an old Fordson tractor. He couldn't keep it running, having to crank on it for hours when it quit. He came in at noon and told Grandpa he'd have to have a new tractor. So, after dinner, they drove into Pawnee City, Neb., to the Allis dealer. Being a good Scotsman, he was not going to pay the extra $10 the dealer wanted. So, on the way home, he said to him, "What are we going to do? I have to have a tractor." Grandpa said to not worry. When they got home, he would call the Minneapolis-Moline dealer in Axtell, Kan. He did and offered that dealer the same deal. The M-M dealer agreed to it. The Allis dealer came to our farm that night. He told Grandpa he decided he'd take the offer. Grandpa said he had no use for two tractors; he had already made the deal with the M-M dealer. In 1943, my uncle was farming with my dad. They needed another tractor. They made a deal to buy a black-market Allis WC. That deal also fell through. After the war, they bought a used WC. In December 1956, Dad picked me up at school and we went to the dealership, where he traded the WC for this WD45 that's in the picture. He told me on the way home that he wouldn't need any more new tractors. We never farmed a lot of row crops, but that tractor and bale were running about every day during the summer and fall. This tractor and baler, and a collection of 14 Allis tractors, are still on the farm that was homesteaded by my great-grandpa in 1866. There have been seven generations farming this land. My wife Becki and I celebrated our 61st anniversary at (the Gathering of the Orange in 2025) in Lathrop, Mo. Our family brought six Allis tractors to that show. Allis a long time coming to family By Bob Smith, Pawnee City, Neb. 41 OLD ALLIS NEWS