The heat and high humidity continues and the sun even appears hotter than normal.
Hot Sun
Picture of the Day for August 25, 2013
How a Sunday morning at church over the years would have seen different types of vehicles in the parking lot, from the horse and buggies in my grandmothers time to the current day cars and everything in between. And although the brands are familiar; like Rolls Royce, Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge, these cars have a different look than today’s vehicles.
Old Cars
Picture of the Day for August 24, 2013
A weekend didn’t mean the end of work for farmers and with the oats ripe, the day might be filled with the threshing crew to separate the oats from the stalks and husks. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming, taking about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century. The invention of the thrashing machine or thresher eased the burden of farmers, from the small units to the large ones that often worked in tandem with the steam tractor.
Numerous belts and pulleys turned the gears and conveyors and if everything was working right, the oat kernels would be auger into a wagon and the stalks would be blown on the straw pile. I know I won’t want to be the one figuring out how to put all the belts on and on which pulleys. Or having my fingers any near them when turning!
Grain Thresher Belts
Picture of the Day for August 23, 2013
This newly opened sunflower is smiling in the sunshine and many others are smiling because it is Friday and the weekend is near.
The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an annual plant native to the Americas. The earliest known examples in the United States of a fully domesticated sunflower have been found in Tennessee, and date to around 2300 BC.
What is usually called the “flower” on a mature sunflower is actually a “flower head” (also known as a “composite flower”) of numerous florets (small flowers) crowded together. The outer petal-bearing florets (ray florets) are sterile and can be yellow, red, orange, or other colors. The florets inside the circular head are called disc florets, which mature into seeds.
The flower petals within the sunflower’s cluster are always in a spiral pattern. Generally, each floret is oriented toward the next by approximately the golden angle, 137.5°, producing a pattern of interconnecting spirals, where the number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. Typically, there are 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in the other; on a very large sunflower there could be 89 in one direction and 144 in the other. This pattern produces the most efficient packing of seeds within the flower head.
(And for those who haven’t had math class is a while, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …, where the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. And the sunflower uses 34 and 55 or 89 and 144.)
The Golden Sunflower
Picture of the Day for August 22, 2013
What a difference sitting in this old Ford car to a new Ford car. No SYNC, no MP3 or CD player, no cruise and all the other gauges. No bells and whistles in this car as it doesn’t even have a cup holder! The dash has the ignition key and the amp gauge and nothing else to clutter up this nice old car.
(And another old Chevy truck to enjoy too even if through the dirty window.)
Old Ford Car
Picture of the Day for August 21, 2013
Farm machinery has its own type of artwork. This inner circle of the Case Steam Tractor rear wheel makes an interesting pattern. But it isn’t a wheel that you would want to run over your foot as the wheel is five and a half feet in diameter and two feet wide and the steam tractor empty weight is 24,000 pounds. You can see the full wheel on Monday’s picture.
Red Rear Wheel
Picture of the Day for August 20, 2013
In 1947, Willys-Overland Motors debuted its Willys Jeep truck that served up everything that a farmer or laborer could want without much else. Buyers could have their truck with a pickup bed or a stake bed, or they could even take home a bare chassis if they liked depending on their needs.
Willys Jeep Truck
Picture of the Day for August 19, 2013
The steam tractor was used in rural North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to aid in threshing, in which the owner/operator of a threshing machine or threshing rig would travel from farmstead to farmstead threshing grain. Oats were a common item to be threshed, but wheat and other grains were common as well.
Steam traction engines were often too expensive for a single farmer to purchase, so “threshing rings” were often formed. In a threshing ring, multiple farmers pooled their resources to purchase a steam engine. They also chose one person among them to go to a steam school, to learn how to run the engine properly. There were also threshing contractors, who owned their own engine and thresher, and went to different farms, hiring themselves out to thresh grain.
The steam tractor ran the belts that would turn other equipment like the threshing machine. The big boiler on wheels had water which was heated into steam in a boiler until it reaches a high pressure. When expanded through pistons or turbines, mechanical work is done. The reduced-pressure steam is then condensed and pumped back into the boiler. And on this Case engine, the piston turns the large wheel which turns the belt used to power other equipment.
Case Steam Tractor
Picture of the Day for August 18, 2013
Watching the clouds go by on a warm, lazy, summer afternoon.
Lazy Summer Day
Picture of the Day for August 17, 2013
The center of the black-eyed susan is soaking up the sun and later this fall, hundreds of seeds will land on the ground and some will take root for more yellow beauty next year.
Black-eyed Susan
