This is a big one. A really big model which appears to be genuinely 1:43 scale, before Corgi lost their nerve and made big vehicles in small scale and little ones in big scale in a sort of Narnia style of making everything more homogenous. If this is really 1:43 scale then it is a 12 foot cut machine which seems about right.
It was first released in 1959 with all metal parts, the tines and combs on the front and all the wheels were metal. The first update was in 1960 when the combs were replaced with plastic and again in 1961 it got plastic wheels. It remained in the range until 1964. The one to go for is the later model with plastic combs and wheels as this is the highest value version
This example is missing some bits like the support for the output spout, the augur and its drive pulley plus one of the combs. I changed the screw which raises and lowers the cutters and will replace the other bits as and when I can. It is a very early one with rare metal wheels, but it is in a very sorry state.
We didn't have a combine on our farm, we only ever grew grain (feed barley) occasionally (too cold in the north of England) and then it was no more than about 5 acres, so we borrowed my uncle's machine with my cousin driving it. His was a Ferguson, pre Massey Ferguson, grey like an old grey Fergie with a TVO powered Standard two litre engine out of the Vanguard. It was a bagger though, not a tanker like this and only a six or eight foot cut. Where this one has the tank on the side his had a platform for a man to stand and change the sacks and a chute to take them gently to the ground. It was really just a mobile threshing machine with a cutter bar on the front.
Mind you I do remember before then when we cut the corn with a reaper and binder belonging to my mother's cousin, Jimmy Todd. This was a machine towed behind a tractor and driven from its wheels, it would have originally been horse-drawn. My father would drive the tractor and my Gandpa Todd (born 1888) rode the binder, his favourite job. This machine simply cut the corn and wrapped armful sized bundles of it with binder twine, these sheaves were then dropped gently to the ground and gathered back to the farm on a trailer. Once the sheaves were safely in, the threshing machine used to come to the farm fetched by Sammy Barr, a local pikey, the noise and the smell are impossible to forget, it was pulled and powered by Sammy's old Fordson that made a grand noise and smelt wonderfully of hot oil that mixed with the noise of the ancient threshing machine and the smell of barley being threshed and straw being dumped out. There was our Ferguson FE35 parked next to the thresher running at high revs with the Welger bottle baler on the back, the straw was fed into the baler by a man with a hay fork and another man took away the bales. That was the sort of work that really made you fit, working at the speed of the machines in the heat.
