What is it? CL

My dad uses a smaller version of one of the following:

These were developed in the late 60's and make the use of smaller bales remain attractive to smaller farmers. I was lucky, my granddad was getting to where he couldn't help stack hay and I being a young sprout of about 10 years old was not deemed sufficiently "robust" to be able to help stack all of the hay. So Dad invested in a New Holland bale wagon. Remarkably clever design yet almost dead stupid in the relatively small number of moving parts required to make this miracle of mechanical and hydraulic engineering work.

I didn't blame him. It was a one-lane dirt road for access to his pastures. I hadn't been to that pasture before. He did not anticipate anyone going so fast. The wire was conspicuous. I did not anticipate the effect of the low sun on my scratchy visor.

Very very common here in my area. A treat to use.

Gunner

Political Correctness

A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

they are wrapped after innoculation with something to make silage. the mookers love the stuff.

Stealth Pilot

The old farms on my mother's side did not have hay storage like that. I remember playing in the lofts tossing I guess Timothy squares about. It was eastern Indiana so it definitely was not Bermuda. My dad tells tales of helping gather hay when he was a kid so that was 70+ years ago. Pitch forks, hay wagon and people stomping on the stacks to get more on the wagon. Internal combustion powered machinery has definitely reduced a lot of human labor. Kind of like electricity in a wood shop.

I lookied through an old photo album, and I have to take back part of

Same here. The slat back was usually at a slight angle too, leaning towards the back or away from the trailer. The bailer had a long shoot and there was usually a slight incline up to the trailer. The bales would be pushed along at the same rate as bales were being made by the bailer. Standing on the wagon, grab the bale, stack it on the trailer and turn around, repeat... If you were good, you could get the bales stacked on a trailer like this 6 to 7 tiers high and not have any fall off before reaching the barn :)

The summer was hot and dry. The rains hit just as the farmers were trying to harvest/salvage what little grew...

The ground should be partial frozen and snow covered right now. Nothing is frozen, no snow, just rain and mud.

Funny you would say that. My first thought was that it looked strangely like the back of a Kane Dead Reckoning Computer my dad had when I was a kid. Maybe this is some sort of elementary navigation device? Here is a link to the Kane DR Computer, showing the back.

--riverman

RH, how about a close up of the text? It looks like it says "2/5 de m/m par haute", which is technically nonsensical, directly translating from french to say "2/5 of m/m by high", but it looks like there's some additional letter(s) at the end of 'haute'.

I wonder if it originally had some sort of slider over the top of it with a hairline that made a horizontal bar across the numbers. That would allow someone to set the vertical scale at some value, then look across to the horizontal scale (as determined by the pointer) to make some sort of adjustment.

RH, closeups of the sides also, please? To see if there are any scratches or wear marks?

--riverman

... snip

Wow, had no idea they had gotten so expensive. Dad's is not self-propelled, it is a 2-wide by 4-high per level, seven level (56 bales per load) wagon. It was well over 35 years ago that he got it

We never had to stack our hay in barns. Colorado is dry enough that outside stacking is not an issue.

That's a fact

Hi riverman,

I'm no expert with the French language, but what you posted is more-or-less what I came up with too ("2/5 of m/m by high"). I messed around for a while searching on this with different combinations and came up with nothing. Here are the translations I came up with:

de = of; from par = a; per; by haute = high; height

The scales/grid are almost too simple to be of much use, unless you were suppose to lay something over top of them. It would be interesting to know if they are accurate to any common units like mm.

I would be interested in seeing a side view of the slide too and to know how easy the slide moves (like will it stay put in one place once moved, or can it just as easily flop around). It didn't look like the slide lined up with the grid scale in any sort of way to the images.

Another thought too, maybe the item came from a French speaking area of Canada? It kinda has a wood/logging scale tool look to me (shrug).

I think the last letter is a "U", the closest shot of this text that I have was the link on my site, same as this one:

The slider idea sounds like a good possibility. I took the photos of this tool at an auction and didn't take any of the sides, just the front and back. It was in a box lot and they had no description of it. I've been doing some searching on it but haven't had any luck yet.

Rob

Massey-Ferguson rig, vintage 1969:

That's certainly not the way silage is made around here!

Hmm, another clue/observation: it looks like the distance that the little side bar travels (from the bottom to the top of the chart) is the same physical distance as the 'pointer' sweeps across the top of the tool: I bet its just an L-shaped piece of metal, not something geared.

I wonder if we are looking at it wrong: the little bar isn't the handle...its a lever. And the pointer is the handle: when the 'pointer' is furthest to the left ('10'), then 2/5 of 10 is 4, and the little side bar is at the 40. If we read that as 4.0 rather than 40, then the position of the side bar always corresponds to 2/5 of the position of the 'pointer'.

My guess is that there WAS some sort of cover that was connected to the side bar. The user slid the 'pointer' to some position that corresponded to something, and the side bar moved the cover (with a crosshair?) to give a calibration of some sort.

Hmmm, I hate mysteries like this.

--riverman

I wonder if the word isn't "hauteur"?

This link suggests a measurement of a fish's body height.

Perhaps it's some sort of gauge for determining whether a fish is legal to keep.

Hi Rob,

I suspected that was your only pictures at this time. Thanks for updating us on that.

I searched for anything related to scaling lumber that might look like this and didn't find anything of interest. Of course I've played out a bunch of other ideas too :)

It looks/feels like something from around 1900 or maybe even earlier, but I have no basis for that.

I kinda like Riverman's idea that there was something that slid over the top of the scale/grid area and this engaged with the slide on the side. The scale on the back side though has a slight angle to the horizontal lines. Not sure if that is significant or not.

"m/m" is also an abbreviation for "by mass," used in chemistry and pharmacology to describe the concentration of a substance in a mixture or solution. 2% m/m means that the mass of the substance is 2% of the total mass of the solution or mixture.

Maybe that bit of trivia will help somebody else and maybe not...

Here is the largest photo that I have that shows the end of the word, doesn't appear to be an R after the U, clicking on the image should make it bigger:

I've got a couple emails that I plan to send to some tool collectors in the next day or two concerning this tool, hopefully one of them will recognize it.

Rob