We had a little clipper mill like this at home, and I remember cleaning seed grain with it. To keep count of the number of bushels cleaned we'd pencil hash marks on the granary door, vertical for the first four bushels, then a diagonal through them for the fifth, and so on. A collection of interchangeable sieves were necessary to use it properly; grates on each one were of different sizes to accommodate whatever size of kernels we were cleaning
Thank goodness I never had to work around one of these. Constructed of wood, this one must really have been old. One of my early memories was of a hired man who picked me up and teased me about throwing me in, just like they were tossing shocks of grain in. I was scared, and I remember Dad telling him to stop.
Dad received quite a serious injury while a young lad riding a horse-drawn disc like this. He related as to how, near their farm at Nome, ND, the small implement hit a rock in the field and jumped up throwing him forward and thereby underneath the sharp disc wheels. He had to crawl and limp home for attention to his wounds.
From the heat and the smoke generated by this monster a person working around it must have been miserable . I have read and heard stories of the maintenance required to keep one of these operating. I remember tilling fields when my tractor pulled through a not uncommon old bed of clinkers that had been cleaned out of the boiler in a past time.This collection of old machines has been collected by some group who are interested in keeping some of the old history alive.
