Mini Combine Turns Heads At Shows

Mini Combine Turns Heads At Shows COMBINES Miscellaneous 29-6-28 When Rob Rose, a road mechanic for Agraturf Equipment Services in Simcoe, Ontario, decided to turn a lawn tractor into a combine, he didn't use a real combine as a model. "I purchased one of the little toy models of the Deere 9860 STS combine they sell for kids. I set it on the work bench at home and kept going back and forth to it," he says. Rose used the toy to help turn a LT 150 Deere lawn tractor into a 5-ft. tall, 6-ft. wide replica of the combine. It turned a lot of heads at his company's exhibit at the recent Canada's Outdoor Farm Show. Although the tractor-combine drives around just fine, the additional harvesting parts don't actually function. To make the machine work, he reversed the axles and raised it up to get more ground clearance. Duals on front give the machine more traction. He also lengthened the frame and rails using shop scraps. Rose fabricated all the additional parts from scratch to make it look like a combine. That, he says, was the biggest challenge. "Duplicating the side panels on it was the hardest because there's a lot of curves in it," he says. "I put about 100 hours into each panel." The entire project took about 1,500 hours. Since completing the project in July, he's heard a lot of comments about the machine. "It went off better than I anticipated." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Agraturf Equipment Services, Inc., 2559 Hwy 24 N, Simcoe, Ontario, Canada N3Y 4K3 (ph 877 426-8130 or 519 426-8130; fax 519 426-6310; simcoe@agraturf.com; www.agraturf.com).

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