Restored Overby Corn Picker

This mechanical corn picker was designed and built by the Overby brothers, John and Theodore, before any commercial corn picker was available. They had 79 parts cast to their specifications from a foundry in Minneapolis. Drawings and the machine itself is the patent model submitted to the U.S. Patent Office. Their patent application was successful. They must have begun work on it in the 1890s, and trial and error led to many modifications in design. The machine worked as it ran for years picking corn until the metal parts were worn out. But there was never a second machine built. It was pulled by 6 horses to get it to run all the machinery. It only did one row at a time, but was still much faster than picking corn by hand. To see my previous post during restoration just click here. In the comments on this link is a Facebook link to a wealth of photos of what it looked like before and during restoration.