Old Head Gate

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My parents are in really poor health and I’ve been down on the farm helping them. My bros and sis and I are taking turns staying with them.
Was out poking around the farm I grew up on and the place has grown up pretty badly. When my old man’s farm equipment gets old or broke he parks it or piles it, always saying ‘I can fix that someday, that was a good tractor, truck, car, baler, brush hog, etc. I call them ‘grovers’.
They’re parked or piled and a grove grows up around them. Confession, my old pickup from high school is a grover on that farm, with a big oak tree growing up through the bed.
Anyways, I built this head gate in vo-ag in 1970. I was 16. This is exactly where it stood, there used to be a pole barn and corral we built there. Those railroad ties aren’t the originals. If you look at the second pic, you can see the pipes used in the frame aren’t pipes, but are actually steel shell casings we welded together to make pipe. My ag teacher was a master scrounger and bought these from an artillery base, Fort Chaffee, Arkansas on the cheap. The business end of the head gate is made from two old driveshafts we got at a salvage yard. I looked it over and couldn’t find where any of my welds broke in the last 54 years.
About those railroad ties, when I brought this home my reward was to get to dig two three foot deep postholes for railroad ties to attach it to. In a corral. The dirt was hard as concrete. I made it almost two feet, grabbed the chainsaw and cut the ends off the ties and stuck the sawed off ends in the ground. Watered them in good and it was solid as a rock. Tthe first cow he decided to try it out on was our hereford bull. He had a continual case of the scours so I called him Bluebutt. The old man hated that name. So in the bull goes, we clamp the headgate around his neck, lock it in and damned if that bull didn’t pick up the whole gate and try to walk off with it. Busted. So I got to redo it. The old man was laughing so hard I didn’t get punished. Even complimented on my creativity. I did get one of those head shakes we’ve all seen as teenagers.
Great memories here. We worked our asses off on this place. It hard to see it gone to seed.
PS…there are some monster deer on this place now.

BKB

Cool memories. Sorry to hear the reason you’re there though. Did you acquire the Posthole nickname before, or after this? (If BEFORE, you should have already known better). 😉

Nothing like old memories.

That’s pretty cool stuff Barry


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