The Willie Suchanek Lawson Engine

     “How do I start this thing?”

     “Insert the knot of the starter rope into the notch in that flywheel pulley.  Wrap the rope around the pulley three or four times, hold the choke wire in full-on position with one hand while you pull the rope with the other hand.”

     “No, no, no, not the engine.  That’s not what I meant at all.  This story, how do I start this story?”

      It’s is fitting and proper that this story is as hard to start as the little Lawson engine can be.  This began as a story about hauling wheat.  Like the road to heaven, tempting diversions spring up everywhere.  I seem to follow Yogi Berra’s sage advice, “when you see a fork in the road, take it.”   So, here goes.

     Life didn’t begin at birth.  Life began when the conscious memory began to create and store images.  I’m told that I badly burned my feet as a toddler by walking onto the floor furnace grate.  I was a patient in Children’s Hospital.  I have absolutely no memory of that.  (Woops, another sidetrack.) I was still more vegetable than animal then.

     There are things about the farmyard that go back to the beginning of my life:  An old red barn, two red chicken houses, a hog house (the cement floor survives), a wind charger on a three-legged tower, a tank house (right where the current pump house sits), the shop and milk house (pretty much unchanged in appearance except for the plastic siding and metal roof), the red granary a few hundred yards north of the farmyard.

     The old grain auger belongs in that list.  Like the sun, moon, and stars, it pre-existed me.  It was always there.

    

  Back in the forties or fifties, Dad and Willie Suchanek bought nearly identical set-ups, sixteen foot augers with Lawson engines.  Picture the rear axle of a rear-drive vehicle, the wheels on either end, a differential in the center with a drive shaft protruding forward.  Replace the drive shaft with about a one-and-a-half inch galvanized pipe about ten feet long, the galvanizing so old it has turned blue, used as a hitch to pull the machine behind a vehicle.  Back to the differential, place about a two-and-half inch pipe coming out of the differential vertically at a right angle to the drawbar. 

     Inside the vertical pipe was a slightly smaller pipe that could be raised or lowered by a crank and cable device.  On top of the vertical pipe was a healthy piece of square tube forming a tee with the movable pipe.  On one side of the square tube, the six inch auger was strapped.  On the other side of the tee branch was a metal frame used to secure the Lawson engine.  When you turned the cable crank, the auger, engine and all rose up. You needed a ladder to service the engine.

    A long belt ran from the pulley on the motor’s drive shaft to the top of the auger.  The drive pulley was on the top of the shaft that held the auger flights.  That pulley was at right angle to the engine pulley, so two angled idler pulleys directed the belt around the corner.

     There was one difference between our auger and Willie’s auger.  Our Lawson had a small pulley on the drive shaft to run the belt.  Willie thought that would run too fast, so he had a gear reduction boxed mounted on the end of his drive shaft.  He found that he had to put a much bigger pulley on the gear box shaft to get the auger up to speed.  Hmmm.

      There was another downside of the gear box addition—the gear reduction also reversed the shaft rotation.  If you used Willie’s engine to replace a normal engine, you had to figure a way of placing the engine so that the drive belt would go the right direction.  See? (Willie would have said.)    

     We had a lot of trouble with grasshoppers in the fifties and sixties.  They would eat the wheat into nothingness.  We had a poison spreader that was a 50-gallon drum with a ground driven whirligig beneath it.  You put poison bait in the drum and pulled the machine behind the pickup.  An adjustable gate in the bottom of the drum let the poison grain fall on the whirligig.  You hoped the grasshoppers found the bait before they found the emerging wheat seedlings.  It was usually a fall chore to keep the grasshoppers from devouring newly-planted wheat. 

    One year the hoppers were bad in spring and early summer, so bad Dad hired Nelson Stake to fly his Piper Cub over the headed-out wheat.  The hoppers would bite the wheat stem in two, letting the immature wheat head fall uselessly to the ground.  Nelson’s Cub had a barrel full of chemical where the back seat should have been.  Spray booms were attached to the wings.  It took two or three fills to spray 160 acres. 

     Dad and I “flagged” for Nelson.  We stood at the west end of the field until the Cub got lined up on us.  Then we took 15 or 16 steps north, getting out of the way of the low-flying plane, and waited for the plane to turn around and line up on us from the other direction.  Then we took another 15 or 16 steps.

      Nelson instructed Dad in the art of flagging on the telephone. We never saw the man except for glimpses of him as the plane flew by. 

      What was the chemical he sprayed, Aldrin?  DDT?  I don’t remember, but to think we stood out there within 45 feet of the plane spewing the poison seems unimaginable today.  They routinely used diesel fuel as part of the “carrier” for the chemical in those days because diesel stuck to the plants (and us?) and prolonged the chemical activity.  I doubt we took a bath or changed clothes right after we finished spraying.

     Ground rig sprayers came into use.  I remember Dad trying to build his own sprayer by using an auto engine oil pump.  It didn’t work, so one year we rented a spray rig from Ed Hock at Simpson and Company Elevator.  

     Willie had bought a small sprayer that had a belt driven pump mounted on a steel frame with a place for a gas motor.  Willie’s Lawson auger engine wouldn’t work because if you put it on the frame where it was supposed to go, it turned the pump the wrong way.

     The one and only time Willie used the sprayer, he borrowed our Lawson engine, identical to his except for the reversing gear reduction box, or he borrowed one from his hired man Lawrence Andersen.  Willie and Lawrence (L.M.) set out to spray DDT on the grasshoppers. 

     They mounted the sprayer and a 50-gallon drum in the back of Willie’s Dodge pickup.  Willie had a twelve foot pipe “boom” with an assortment of nozzles on the end.  The idea was to extend the boom away from the pickup far enough to avoid the drift.  But apparently it didn’t work. 

     Willie got a face full of spray drift as did L.M.  Willie rinsed off in the stock tank.  L.M. didn’t bother.  The next day, L.M.’s face puffed up and he was out of action for a day or two.  Willie was okay, but he never wanted anything to do with that spray rig after that.  He gave it to us.  In exchange, we sprayed his grasshoppers a few time over the years.  

    Willie’s auger must have gone out of use about that time, because somehow, the Lawson engine came along with the sprayer.   Our Lawson engine suffered another fate.

      Sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, Dad bought a new Mayrath auger from Snell grain in Genoa.  It was longer than the old auger and the Lawson wasn’t big enough to pull it.  So we got a nine horse Briggs and Stratton engine to run the new auger. 

     The Lawson became the center piece of many attempts to build a gocart (yet another fork in the road).  I think it may have been subject to an overhaul attempt too.  It ended its life in  pieces, some of which still remain in a junk pile on the farm. 

    With the demise of our Lawson, Willie’s engine had to be adapted to the sprayer, a machine I used into the 80’s as a sprayer and even later as a fire-fighting machine to take to the harvest field.  Uncle Ricky may have been in on the adaptation.  Angle irons welded to the original sprayer frame allowed the Willie engine to sit to the side of the sprayer pump and thus turn the pump the right direction. 

     I mounted the pump and engine on an old trailer Dad used to carry a welder engine.  He tried to use old combine engines that never would start.  He eventually bought a 220 volt Montgomery Ward welder and abandoned the trailer.  I bought a 150 gallon poly tank and mounted it on the trailer.  I still use tank and trailer to water trees.  Gravity flow works for that job, no engine power needed.  But the Lawson remained a part of the water tank trailer.  Thus it spends most of the year in a shed out of the weather.

    Willie’s Lawson engine got returned to auger duty when we put up the new grain bin.  When we ran the cement for the granary floor, we formed a channel in the floor of the bin that would accommodate a six inch auger.  We covered the channel with iron plate.  At the end of the channel in the center of the bin, a metal slide works as a gate to control the flow of grain.  

     I attached Willie’s Lawson motor to the end of a sixteen foot auger that slides into the channel under the granary floor.  It has plenty of horsepower for that job, as the grain only moves horizontally and isn’t elevated.  The old Mayrath with Briggs and Stratton engine does the elevating job.

     So now you know the story of the Willie Suchanek Lawson engine.  As the other nearly-identical Lawson engine was always a part of the farm in my memory, the Willie engine must be as old as our old Lawson, as old as I am, and still running.

 Now I can tell the story I set out to tell, about hauling wheat in December.