Have no clue what this is....

[taxidermywalker]

I bought this from a guy house that was having a sale. it made me very interested. He told me it was a corn grinder but i knew it wasnt just from looking at it but needless to say i bought it and still have no clue and have spent coutless weeks asking people. It seems to have a small glass tube on the side that runs into it and looks to m like a pot or something set on top there.

[waywardangler]

What do the internals look like?  A corn ginder (sheller) would cut the kernels off the corn and spit out a naked cob.  What does the wheel on the side do?  Does the large wheel laying on the grass have anything to do with this?  I do not see a hand crank on this, is there one missing?

[sapphire]

Another question......the wheel appears to be enclosed......is there any opening on the lower part, say for a belt? or would this require attachment to a crank shaft to be turned?

[Sara Finn]

It appears to be part of a cream separator, to me.
The glass tube you mention is known as a 'sight-glass'.

Yours may, or may not, have had a cast iron stand portion.

Are there any company names/numbers on the exterior of its' castings?

Welcome to the Antique-Shop forum, by the way, taxidermywalker.

[KC]

Like this 1904 cream separator?

[Sara Finn]

Yup, KC, a stand like that.
 

MOO-VING ON......

[sapphire]

Or this one? 

http://www.claytondeerparkhistoricalsociety.com/photo_67.html

"This cream separator was on the farm when Messerschmidts move there in the early 1970s. Messerschmidts bought the farm from Chapmans, who bought it from the Warren Stevens family. You can see the hand crank, but also had a pulley if you had an electric or gas motor to power it."

[sapphire]

A 1939 Massey Harris

[taxidermywalker]

Wow yall are good....i was just fixing to explain it more and then all the post of what it is are on there. I appreciate it so much. Im fixin to post a new post on somethign else ithat i know what it is but not sure what time period or if its even real and what it would be worth cause i cant find this guy anywhere either...thanks again for yalls help

[cogar]

Isn't that awful heavy cast iron to be a cream separator?

How bout a picture of the other side of it.

[taxidermywalker]

ill post a pic of the other side soon...it has a crank on the other side...

[waywardangler]

I believe that most if not all bodies of cream separators were made of cast iron.

[KC]

Very true wayward.  They had to be made sturdy to put up with a working farm!

[cogar]

I believe that most if not all bodies of cream separators were made of cast iron.

Well now I can believe that because 95+% of all household and industrial metal implements, etc., were made of cast iron up until the early to mid 20th Century. Cookware, kitchen items, farm machinery, etc., ..... anything that could easily be "molded" was made of "cast iron", which, by the way, is how it got its name of "cast", meaning "to mold".

And those ole timey manufacturers were frugile and t'weren't in the habit of making something 4 or 5 times stronger than it needed to be, and in my opinion the base unit of a "cream separator" didn't need to be as strong as the "per say" one pictured above.

But now iffen you all had told me it was grist mill mechanism for "grinding" cornmeal, flour, etc., then I probably wouldn't have questioned it .... given the fact that "grinding" corn is a far tougher job than "grinding" milk.

Cheers