(Wayne’s Storyworth)
Before the government decided that only their supporters could sell milk , farmers had a way of making a few dollars by selling milk, cream and butter.(More on this in a future story about Chester).
We had many chores on the farm in the 60’s . I was six years old in 1960 and was expected to contribute to the vast enterprise of dads farm when I was able to walk and carry something. Often what I had gladly done to be more like dad quickly turned into something that I wished I had never learned how to do. Things like ,bringing in the wood , slopping the pigs, gathering eggs, shoveling shit, milking cows, and making butter.
I liked running the separator cause you just had to pour raw milk into it, turn the crank and watch the cream go into one pail and the milk go into another (there was a fly wheel in the separator so you didn’t need to turn the crank forever). You used a clean rag to strain the shit and flys out of the raw milk as you poured it into the separator (see the video on facebook.com/watch/?v=695736686004977).
The cream was carefully carried to the milk house and saved for a few days until you had enough to make some butter (The milk house was close to the farm house and was dug into the ground to keep the milk cooler than in the farm house).
We had all the things you needed to make butter. The wooden butter mold must have been made by somebodies great, great, grandpa. Once the butter was churned you would add salt to it and kneed the butter with your sterile hands and then pack it into the sterile wooden butter mold.
Yes of course we had a butter churn. The churn was a little bigger than a 5 gallon pail and like the separator it had a crank on it. Inside the churn was two wooden paddles with holes in them. There was nothing modern like a fly wheel on the churn so you had to churn the crank continuously (hard to believe I found a picture of a churn just like it). Dad and mom both hated sitting there and churning that crank. They had better things to do and it was really boring. Of course they could delegate this job to the boy that was sitting there watching them work up a sweat. It seemed like you had to turn the crank for ever. As the milk thickened it became harder and harder to turn the crank. You would switch arms as one got tired. I really hated making butter. You could try to tell your little sister how much fun it was but that only worked once.
So what was I to do. I started crying and begged mom to not make me churn butter any more. Well mom always had my back. She pushed the request up the food chain to the wizard of the family, dad.
Dad got out his best haywire but couldn’t figure out how to do it with just haywire. This required something more hi-tech. The baler had a gas motor and some belts on it and that may have been his inspiration. Dad had an electric motor he has savaged from an old cloths dryer and some used fan belts from the tractor.
He attached the churn and the electric motor to a board about four feet long (used his best haywire). He hack sawed off the churns crank handle and replaced it with a pulley he found that fit the used belt. He had to buy the pulley to go on the electric motor because he couldn’t find one in the garage or granary that fit.
I know dad was afraid something might go wrong so we both moved as far away as we could get in the porch where the contraption was being tested and he had me stand behind him.. Dad filled the churn with fresh cream and plugged the electric motor into the wall .
Now for some basic engineering . The motor was most likely 1800 rpm since that is the most common speed used in cloths dryers . The two pulleys were pretty much the same diameter. This meant there was no speed reduction between the churn and the electric motor. So the old churn tried to spin up to 1800 rpm too.
As it accelerated some of the hay wire on the board let go. The wooden paddles in the churn went flying out of the top. The cream plastered the ceiling and the walls and us. Thank god the belt came off.
Dad put the project on hold for a while. But the cows kept making cream and now we had no handle to turn on the churn ( I was happy about this).
Dad patched up the churn (one wooden paddle was broken and the bottom a little dented). Dad figured out the need for some speed reduction between the electric motor and the churn. Looking at the clothes dryer you could see that the pulley on the churn needed to be much larger , like the size of the drum on the clothes dryer.
Where was he going to get a pulley this big. Well in the milk house loft there was an old spinning wheel. The wheel on spinning wheel might be just the size he needed.
Some how dad managed to mount the spinning wheel wheel on the churn where the crank had been.
For the next test we both stood outside the porch with me behind him (buster too) and the porch door closed. He used an extension cord and plugged it in (with just water in the churn this time).
Amazing . It worked perfectly. Now churning butter became a fun job and dad and mom could get back to farming.
Because of the milk laws there wasn’t any money to be made in milking ten cows. As time went by we ended up just milking one cow and there wasn’t enough cream to justify making butter any more.
The enemy