Ding, ding, ding! Answer
I wish I had spelled "you're" correctly from my last post. Drat!.
Dale gets the gold forehead star today. What I was looking for is a grain cradle.
A grain harvest consists of cutting, gathering, drying, thrashing. The tool I�m looking for is a grain cradle. It works like a scythe to cut the grain, but the grain cradle has four to six curved wood �fingers� in the same approximate plane as the blade. A scythe�s motion cuts but scatters the cut stalks. In the process much of the grain is knocked from the heads and remains in the field. When scythe cut grain is gathered it is laying in all directions. It is then generally is raked and placed in piles, and if one is not careful of how it is collected, of moisture content, and where it is stored, cut grain can generate enough heat in this piled up condition to catch fire. This makes animals who expect to be fed in the winter very angry. The cradle is worked like a scythe but the multiple fingers of the cradle catch the cut grain and result in having most of the stalks collected with the heads in the same direction. It also loses fewer grain heads. This makes the grain sheaves collected in the cradle or turned over in the field easier to tie off using a length of stalk or string. It made thrashing much easier because the cuttings all faced the same direction. Later the stalks could later be cut back using a straw cutter/guillotine and the grain heads thrashed more efficiently as opposed to flailing a pile of cuttings with far more straw than grain. With a cradle again according to the net, once a rhythm was established and the blade sharpened each quarter mile, four or perhaps a little more acres could be cut by a pro in a dry day. I searched the internet to find a video of a cradle in action cutting and piling stalks, but came up empty. There are many pictures of cradles on browsers under �grain cradle� for those that have further interest. A grain cradle is an awkward tool to store because it is wide and the handle is at an angle to the cutter and fingers. As a result a grain cradle is less often cared for(the finger length, smoothness, curvature is important) and therefore is less often seen than a scythe these days. And yes, Dale, even though the sale was well attended the cradle went for, I believe, $8--down from the $10 on the tag.
