During late summer 2020, I sat in the cab of a Case IH Axial-Flow 9250 combine equipped with so much automation, you can put in parameters for grain quality and the combine will determine internal settings itself.
Just four days later, I stood in the Hancock County Agricultural Museum in Britt, Iowa, staring at an International Harvester McCormick No. 64 pull-type combine, like the first combine I remember my dad using. I was planning to do a story of a virtual walk-around of the new Case IH Axial-Flow 9250. Immediately, I decided I would do a walk-around of the McCormick 64, as well. The comparison would be striking.
The walk-around of the latest Case IH combine model appeared on this website a couple of weeks ago. As far as I can see, the old machine and the new machine have two things in common: They’re both painted red, and both can harvest wheat and soybeans.
Dad’s McCormick No. 64
The pull-type combine with a canvas was well used when my dad bought it. Dad wasn’t a mechanic, and he passed his lack of mechanical prowess on to me.
Unfortunately, our No. 64 PTO-driven combine broke a lot, especially by the time I was old enough to be in the field with Dad. He knew more than a few cuss words, and he typically used all of them before he had a chain pieced back together or a bearing replaced.
One of my earliest memories with that old combine is getting it ready to run wheat one hot summer morning. Dad hooked it to the John Deere 620 and pulled it under a shade tree in the pasture near the wheat field, where he banged around on it all morning. Occasionally, he pulled out the faded, grimy owner’s manual, then got some wrenches and attempted to loosen a couple of nuts so he could adjust a setting. They were often stuck. Technically, WD-40 was invented by then, but we hadn’t found out about it yet!
By the late 1960s, my dad finally persuaded his landlord, who owned half the harvesting equipment, that it was time to find a different combine, which they did — a used John Deere 42 pull-type combine.
My best friend’s dad was selling his dairy herd and equipment to concentrate on working full time off the farm, for International Harvester, no less. Our worn-out No. 64 found its way into the auction and sold for $35, to a junk dealer!
I can’t say I shed any tears. That makes my wife, Carla, wonder why I spend good money to buy toy models of McCormick combines similar to the one we had. What can I say? Nostalgia will do that to you. We tend to remember the good things from the old days, not the frustrating moments.
Hey, if they make a toy Case IH Axial-Flow 9250, I’ll probably buy it, too. It will remind me of when I got to sit in the cab of a machine that even my dad would have appreciated!
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<p>MEMORY LANE: Stumbling across this combine in a museum — the first combine I remember my dad using — was ironic after sitting in the cab of a Case IH Axial-Flow 9250 earlier in the same week.</p>
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<p>POWER SOURCE: This McCormick No. 64 combine purchased by Robert Meier of Hancock County, Iowa, in the early 1950s came with a motor to power it. That allowed him to use a smaller tractor, since the tractor didn’t have to supply the power through the PTO shaft. Remember that while this combine may look crude by today’s standards, most farmers were only a decade or less removed from threshing rings in the early 1950s. A machine that let you harvest by yourself and put grain in the tank all in one operation was a big deal.</p>
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<p>BIG TANK? OK, it looked big to me as a kid, especially when it was full. The grain tank on the No. 64 held somewhere around 30 bushels. Today’s Case IH 9250 Axial-Flow 9250 comes with a grain tank rated to hold 410 bushels.</p>
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<p>“QUICK” ADJUSTMENT: If making a reel-height adjustment was supposed to be quick, “quick” is relative. See those long, narrow steel bars with holes in them on each side of the reel? If you wanted to change reel height, you did it by hand — using wrenches and, if you were my dad, a few choice words. Needless to say, reel height on our combine didn’t get changed often.</p>
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<p>GOOD OL’ SICKLE BAR: This machine only had a 6-foot head, big enough to combine two wide rows of soybeans at a time. But if a section broke on the sickle, it sometimes seemed like it was 20 feet long.</p>
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<p>NO ADJUSTMENT HERE: The new Case IH Axial-Flow 9250 can be equipped with an option to adjust spreader settings from the cab if wind direction changes. With the No. 64, when it comes to spreading residue, what you see is what you get: a spindle with rubber paddles driven by a belt on a pulley. Even spread for no-till wasn’t even on the drawing board yet. And the tractor Dad pulled it with didn’t have a cab.</p>
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<p>LOTS OF ROOM: Even literature for the McCormick pull-type No. 80, which came out after the No. 64, talks about lots of room for cleaning grain and separating out trash. That’s still a hallmark that spokespeople point out as an advantage in today’s newest Case IH combine models.</p>
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<p>GET THE GREASE GUN: When I got big enough to push the handle, greasing the combine became my job. There were plenty of places to grease. Notice the ones here toward the rear of the combine. Not all were this easy to get to. We’re currently raising a generation of youngsters who may not know what a grease gun is!</p>
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<p>PATCH IT AND MOVE ON: To say Mr. Meier got his money out of this canvas that took the crop up into the threshing mechanism might be an understatement. Note the patches and that at least one of the wooden slats attached to the canvas is missing its end. To my knowledge, you won’t find the first piece of wood on the Case IH Axial-Flow 9250 combine.</p>
