Posted by Sherman in Idaho [24.32.202.166] on Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 23:13:45 :
In Reply to: "a torch and a scrap pile" posted by Jerry in Idaho [24.223.94.244] on Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 22:39:56 :
You gotta admire the ingenuity and even the fabrication skills of those old timers. They didn't make this stuff for the fun of it. They made it because they needed it for work, and they couldn't buy it, either because nobody made it or because they couldn't afford it. Just a truck with a winch on the front was a wonderful piece of machinery to those guys, and they came up with all kinds of ways to make use of that winch, in the days before hydraulics.
My grandfather bought a used donkey engine for $1000 from the Alaskan Junk Company in Portland sometime in the 1930s. Can you imagine how much money $1000 was back then? A guy who made $1000 in a year was doing pretty well. He not only used it for logging, but he used it to collect three small houses and drag them miles across the farm fields to where he could set them up on round river rocks, nail them together, and have it be the family home. The oldest part, which became the living room, he skidded all the way from Molalla to Dickey Prairie. It was built in 1872 and the walls were made of solid boards stood on end, covered with clapboards on the outside and fiberboard on the inside -- no posts, and no studs. It's still standing today, still sitting on the round river rocks he set it on 80 years ago. My father said when he was a boy, if the wind blew hard, the house would roll a little way back and forth on those river rocks, like ball bearings, until the trees they planted around the house had grown up enough.
Anyway, I'm not going to make fun of what those old guys cobbled together with a torch and a scrap pile, because they were making what they needed to do their work with. Unlike, say, the modern rat rod and rock crawler guys.