Windrower

At any given time I have about 4-6 projects going on at a time. This is partly the result of the Queue, which is partly the result of my lack of focus. In the midst of all this planning, I find it therapeutic to sit down, and start something small, simple, and without a plan. Two weeks ago, right after finishing the ATS, I sat down, and in a couple of hours, completed a small windrower.

The full gallery including instructions may be found here.

Some of my favorite MOCs are the smaller non-motorized ones I have done over the years, like my Feller, my Octan F1, my 4×4 8081, and my Sod Harvester. I built the Windrower to fit in this theme. A Windrower, or Swather, is basically a large lawnmower. The blades on the front cut down hay, and pull all the cuttings to the center to make a row of cuttings, or windrow, to be picked up later.

My version is rather simple. The two main wheels are connected to a center differental through two 8z portal axles. The differential drives a small I3 motor in the rear, and a PTO driveshaft comes out the front. The PTO drives a simple harvesting head made of four z24 gears which are connected with a number of z12 gears. The harvesting head can be raised and lowered by a simple worm gear setup. A simple steering system was created for the rear wheels, and it was connected by a liftarm to the smoke stack so you could control the steering.

The body work took a couple of Bricklink.com orders. After recently making a couple of MOCs in red, I felt the Case IH coloring would be a little redundant, so John Deere Green it was. My collection of green is growing, but there were still some parts needed. After everything arrived, I replaced all the red, and added some yellow wheels, and everything was set. A simple MOC, with some fun features, and an infrequent color.

Happy Building.