Being a “city resident” I need to make straw bales and haven’t had any succes. Era the 1930’s, so what is the size of bales in those days., HO scale. I do have a plastic bag of the real stuff, but of course need to scale it down. Thanks for any advice/ideas. Great Northern in the midwest I’m modeling.
Well having grown up on a dairy farm in the 40’s we didn’t start to bale hay until the late 40’s to early 50’s. However, I believe ther were stationary balers back in the 30’s and I would suspect the bales were probabley in the 40-50 pound range. Hay was mostly put up loose back then and a lot of barn fires were attributed to green hay in the haymow or the barn attic for you city folk. [(-D] Oh, the bale physical size would be approximately 1and a 1/2 foot square and about 3 foot long. Ken Oops, you said straw. Well, the same applies to straw!!!
1930’s, yep they used stationary balers. The hay and straw was brought in loose by the wagon load and then run through the baler. They usually used a steam tractor or an early gasoline tractor with a “belt wheel on it” A long flat belt was placed between the tractor and the baler (or other equipment) to power it. Often the belt crossed over itself to run the machine the opposite direction from the direction of the power from the tractor or stationary engine. We used that type of equipment (not the baler, but the silage blower) up until the 1960’s. I believe the bales from the old stationary balers were a bit bigger than the square bales from the balers pulled behind the tractors in the field. The Alice Chalmer Round balers were in service by the late 1930s. We used to use them on the farm for years. The stationary balers were gone by the time I was born (1946) but my Dad used to talk about them. They were usually taken from farm to farm and all the neighbors would pick in and help each farmer put up the hay.
BTW depending on the setting, you could make bales up about 100lbs. I spent my youth lifting and stacking those things. Ya didn’t mess with Farm boys back then unless you wanted a whoopin"!
If I were modeling hay bales, I would cut small pieces of 1/2" stripwood, the kind we use for building trestles in larger scales than HO, and I would use a fine saw to score them along each side, with the scores running parallel to each other on all sides to simulate the straw. In fact, 80 grit sandpaper scored heavily with one swipe might do it. Then, paint the “bales” straw yellow/brown, and finally put a wash of India Ink over the surfaces. The ink should bring out the lines representing the reeds.
I caution that I have never done this, but it would be something I would try.
Where I went on holiday in Wales up to about 1964/5 they still brought in an outside contractor with a threshing machine and a baler. They lined up straight but not so level thresher next to the tractor which sat there all day chugging over and driving the belt to the thresher. There was then a second belt to the baler. Both belts were down the righthand side looking from the tractor. They had to be tight enough to stay on and slack enough to drop round the pulley wheels to bite and make the drive. They were made of leather strips about 8" wide and between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. The strips were about 10’ long when new and they were butt jointed with big flat metal staples that were put through cut holes and then hammered over. It was impressed on me that you kept well away from the belts at all times.
My job as a kid was having the empty bags ready to hook onto the grain shutes at the tractor end of the thresher and to scoop the chaff clear from underneath so that the machine didn’t clog up.
There was a conveyor almost flat between the thresher and the baler - now I think about it (after all these years) there was a belt from the thresher to the conveyor and then another to the baler. I think that they started one running and then shifted the next from the idler across onto the working pulley, got that running and then got the third one going. This meant that start up was not full load. The things weren’t whizzing away like a combine but chugging steadily all day.
The baler was at least half as big again as a tractor towed baler and had a huge guiliotine that rose and fell cutting the bales. This moved vertically but I recall that it had a long radius arm on each side at the feed end. It was tended - supposed to be tended - by an old boy as the bales wouldn’t come out at the same length all the time.
The bales weren’t square in section but wider than they were high. From memory they’d