The name Fairbanks is cast into it, there seems to be a curved frame, possibly to hold a bowl or something similar and a strange tippy bird foot-like base. Ideas?
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Anonymous
said...
It brings to mind the "Grian Test Weight Scales" that were at the local grain elevators that served farmers in the Midwest where I grew up. The ones from my time would have been made in the 1950s and 1960s, and the design of the pictured scale looks more like the style of the '20s or '30s, and maybe much earlier, to my uneducated eye. I googled for images of ones similar to to my childhood years and came up with nada. However, here's a pic of one that would be of a more recent manufacture date. https://www.hoffmanmfg.com/wp-content/uploads/SCL-720-S0.jpeg
A bushel of grain is a volume measurement, so it can vary in weight. And the grain a farmer sells can obtain a discount or premium in price, depending on what your bushels of grain weighed.
...But grain weight varies with moisture content. I remember in childhood that the grain elevator where we dropped off trailer loads of beans and corn estimated moisture from the weight of a small volume sample. And I always wondered if they were playing games because they simply mixed one farmer's very dry grain with another's moderately dry grain to achieve a desired average while shorting the payments to the producer with slightly higher moisture content.
5 comments:
It brings to mind the "Grian Test Weight Scales" that were at the local grain elevators that served farmers in the Midwest where I grew up. The ones from my time would have been made in the 1950s and 1960s, and the design of the pictured scale looks more like the style of the '20s or '30s, and maybe much earlier, to my uneducated eye.
I googled for images of ones similar to to my childhood years and came up with nada. However, here's a pic of one that would be of a more recent manufacture date. https://www.hoffmanmfg.com/wp-content/uploads/SCL-720-S0.jpeg
A bushel of grain is a volume measurement, so it can vary in weight. And the grain a farmer sells can obtain a discount or premium in price, depending on what your bushels of grain weighed.
Forty pounds a bushel was the standard of excellence up into the 1970s (in the U.S., anyway). I wonder what it is now.
Sorry to stray from the topic. (Honestly, not that sorry).
60 pounds for soybeans these days. I have a fairbanks scale with almost the same "feet" Great pieces to collect!
...But grain weight varies with moisture content. I remember in childhood that the grain elevator where we dropped off trailer loads of beans and corn estimated moisture from the weight of a small volume sample.
And I always wondered if they were playing games because they simply mixed one farmer's very dry grain with another's moderately dry grain to achieve a desired average while shorting the payments to the producer with slightly higher moisture content.
The grain elevators now check moisture content by sticking a probe into the trailer that measures the moisture.
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