Oxen Power Plant - Kilacha 1977

Over at the Kilacha Training Centre there was this junk tractor which we used as raw material for other projects. I dug a hole and took the whole rear end and put one wheel down in the hole with the transmission just slightly below the ground level and mixed some cement to anchor it at the lower hub. I backfilled and attached a full length of two inch pipe to the transmission at the clutch end and ran it out in a small ditch. Used wood block bearings boiled in oil to support it at several places. Then laid some old sheetmetal over the ditch and leveled it off. I attached four long poles to the upper hub and supported them about mid-span with guy wires from a center stand pipe. An oxen was attached to each sweep arm. The output speed could be governed by shifting the transmission or prodding the oxen. On the outboard end of the output shaft was fastened a large two - sheeve pulley which is shrouded a bit with a wooden box. We could power several different implements but the best, by far, was the old two-hole corn sheller which could spin so fast that you could not keep up feeding it. This was about 30 years ago and I don't know how it held up.