Early Toy Combines

Doug Harke

Modern Wheat Harvest

        Many of the younger readers may just assume that combines have been part of the farm machinery line just as long as tractors and threshing machines.  Theoretically, this is correct but functioning combines didn’t appear until the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.  Early combines were very large and powered by an auxiliary engine and were pulled by a large tractor or crawler.  Combines weren’t very common because farms had lots of labor to help with the grain threshing.  On the prairies where I grew up, grain was harvested by cutting with a binder which required a tractor driver and a binder operator and several men to “stook” the bundles in the field.  Threshing was even more labor intensive with at least four hay racks to keep a thresher going.  Each rack was pulled by a team of horses and required the driver to arrange the bundles on the load.  One or more field hands loaded the bundles, from the stooks, on the rack and waited for the next rack to return from the threshing machine.  The thresher was usually operated by the owner.  Two wagons with drivers were needed to haul the grain away.  Therefore, the minimum crew needed was six men to load and haul the bundles to the thresher and another three to operate the machine and take the grain to the farmyard or elevator.  The fluctuating economy of the 1920’s and the Great Depression in the 1930’s easily provided an ample supply of men for the large thresh crews but the soldiers away in World War II created a labor shortage in the mid 1940’s.  This was eased again after the soldiers returned from the War but problems with an adequate supply of short term labor became critical in the early 1950’s when the economy was booming and many workers were lured from the farms with good manufacturing jobs in the cities.  This opened up the market for combines and sales were so strong in the early 1950’s that there was a shortage of new combines.

Classic McCormick Pull Type Combine

        My family had a first hand experience in dealing with the combine shortage in 1952.  After managing a country general store for a dozen years, my father rented my maternal grandmother’s large farm which still included almost 500 acres down from the original size of 1600 acres in the 1920’s.  It would have been a formidable task to thresh 400 acres of oats and barley so my father started with my grandmother’s McCormick-Deering #62 pull-type combine.  The four foot tall oat straw on the fertile lowland soil was too much for the small combine so my dad shopped around for a large self-propelled combine.  His first preference was an International but none was available.  Next on the list was a John Deere but again none was available.  My dad’s first two choices were determined by brand loyalty because the owner of the store that he managed also owned the John Deere and IH dealerships.  The next town had an Oliver dealer with a new #33 self-propelled combine on the lot and the Cockshutt dealer had several.  We ended up buying the Oliver combine and it was a good machine.

Figure from an early 1930’s Vindex catalog showing the John Deere cast iron combine.

         The first toy combines were the cast iron Vindex ones which appeared in the late 1920’s and were marketed until the mid 1930’s.  One of the combines was based on the John Deere model and the other was a Case.  The amount of detail in these cast iron toys was amazing.  They were large toys and quite fragile because of the size.  Both were pull-type and intended to be hitched to a John Deere D or Case L tractor also made by Vindex at the same time.  Probably, the largest farm toy that I had ever seen until the recent Ertl models of large tractors was the John Deere combine.  It is massive and heavy and this contributed to its being readily broken.  Either combine is very rare with the Case probably being even more scarce than the John Deere.  It is likely than no more than a few dozen of these toy combines are in collections today.  There are a number of factors contributing to their rarity including age (seventy-five years ago), fragility, and limited sales because the period of their availability coincided with the Depression.  Both of these cast iron combines are so rare and pricey that I would only use an experienced and proven cast iron repair toy repair service for restoration or repairs.

  Copy from a 1931 Case parts catalog showing the Vindex cast iron Case combine.

   Page from Reuhl catalog showing the two Massey toy combines.

         King made a slush mold Massey-Harris self-propelled combine shortly after the end of World War II.  It was called a Harvest Brigade combine because of  the  groups of combines which started the season with the grain harvest in Texas, in early summer and worked their way north to finish the harvest in the prairie provinces in late October.  Looking back more than fifty years, the King combine seems crude but readily represented the real thing and had working features including a header reel and auger driven by a spring belt from the front axle.  The reel was wooden not unlike the wooden slats on the reels of the real machine.  The scale was approximately 1/20.  

Page from Reuhl catalog showing the two Massey toy combines.

       Reuhl came out with two very detailed and working 1/20 scale toy Massey-Harris combines in the early 1950’s.  The pull-type Clipper combine was based on a design marketed by Plymouth Industries in Wisconsin and Reuhl bought the dies and improved the realism.  This combine could be pulled by the Massey-Harris 44 tractor also made by Reuhl.  Several variations resulted from two or three different hitch styles. There were no shortcuts on Reuhl toys as the diecast parts were accurate scale models and broken parts could be replaced using the order blank packed each toy.  All Reuhl toys were assembled with panhead 4-40 self tapping screws so repair by parts replacement was possible. 

Massey-Harris pull-type combine, with box, which was made by Reuhl.  There were different styles of Reuhl boxes and this is a brown corrugated one.

         The ultimate Massey farm toy is the self-propelled combine made by Reuhl.  A rubber belt drive from the front axle drives the header auger and reel.  The steering really works.  There were two major variations of the self-propelled combine with the seat mounted on a pedestal ahead of the grain tank or the rarer version with the seat mounted right against the grain tank.  The other difference on these two variations is the right or left hand belt drive of the reel.  After Reuhl’s Massey agreement ended, the combine dies were used to produce castings for very similar toy combines sold under the Lincoln brand in Canada.  Lincoln Massey combines do not have the Reuhl engravings on the castings and they have different decals.  I did not have much experience with the Lincoln combines until I restored one for a Canadian collector this past spring.  This must have been one of the last toys because the castings were very rough and the original paint was almost one-eighth of an inch thick in some places.  In contrast, Reuhl toys were known for their exact scale and quality.  There was a large selection of parts to restore both the King Harvest Brigade combine and the Reuhl combines but the supply is dwindling because parts dealers have indicated that so few of these toys are now being found and repaired that it is no longer cost effective to restock the parts.

Massey-Harris self-propelled combine by Reuhl which was sold at the December, 2001 Geneseo Farm Toy Auction.  This is the very with the seat on a pedestal somewhat ahead of the grain tank.

Sometime in a later article I will cover the other early toy combines including the John Deere 12A canvas feed, the later John Deere #30 auger feed, Oliver Grainmaster, and the Minneapolis-Moline.  The John Deere’s were made by Carter Tru-Scale and the Oliver and M-M were made by Slik.

Les Sigrist 

The East Coast Partsman

TTT July 2003 Page 6

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