1923 Dain Hay Press Flat Belt Pulley Fabrication

A friend in my tractor club has a 100-year-old Dain hay press that makes bales of straw or hay. It's got a 3 horse John Deere hit-and-miss engine to run the press. A four-inch flat belt drives the press. One minor problem is, the belt pulley on the engine is too small, so the press runs very slowly.

The guy on the left in the photo above did 80 percent of the restoration on the press after dragging its severely rusted carcass out of the woods in 2011 (it's now 2025) but then he lost interest. The guy in the middle owns the press now. The guy on the right donated the late '20s JD Model E 3 horse engine to the cause. I've been doing some machining and welding to help out the cause.

The hay press owner got a guy to fabricate an eight-inch-diameter pulley to replace the small four-inch pulley but it wasn't really usable, so the owner scrounged up a piece of eight-inch-diameter well casing pipe and I volunteered to try and cobble something up.

My 1340 Smithy lathe is a little too small for this job but I figured I just had to at least give it a try. I chucked the piece of pipe on the outside of the three jaws of the chuck, which isn't the way to do this as it is difficult to get the pipe's centerline parallel with the lathe ways. I got it close though, and that's good enough. After truing up one end, I flipped the pipe end for end and trued up the other end. I then bored out the inside of the pipe to accept a piece of 3/16" plate to act as the pulley's mounting plate or flange.

Somewhere in this machining job I was tightening the tool post top nut and it broke. The nut is a poor design, as it's a very thin-walled tube that is threaded on the inside. See that line in the middle of the tube? That's a split. At this point I thought the job would have to be shelved until I could either buy or make a replacement nut.

I then wondered if I could just weld up the nut, so that's what I tried. It seems to have worked, as I was able to finish the project using the repaired nut.

This next photo below shows the mounting plate after being welded into the end of the pipe. The center hole was then bored out to the proper size to fit the engine's flywheel, and then I started to work on truing up the OD of the pulley. It took me more than two hours just to turn down the outside of the pulley, as the steel was extremely hard and the cutting tool would often just slide along the surface of the steel. When it did cut into the steel, red-hot ribbons of steel would come peeling off (I've never had that happen before). I was surprised the carbide cutting inserts held up as well as they did. I think I went through four insert faces. Each insert has three cutting faces so it wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Also shown is the cutter holder that I had to cobble together so I could turn down the outside of the pipe. Excuse me, belt pulley. The cutter holder was a real kluge but was the only way I could think to do it. The problem was that the lathe carriage didn't fit under the pipe, so I had to extend the cutter eight inches out from the carriage. Yes, there was chatter in abundance. I had to wear ear protection. And notice the pile of shavings that came off the pipe. There's another pile nearly that big on the floor, and another pile back behind the lathe. After the cutting was done, I tried using a file to smooth out the chatter marks. Problem was, the pipe was too hard and just ruined the file.

Here's the finished product. The chatter marks leave a pleasing design in the belt pulley face, don't you think?

I got this project completed just a few days before the local county fair. We shall see if it holds up to five days of use. Below is a photo of the hay press all ready to go at the fair.