It’s Not Junk

"It’s all born of laziness,” said Larry Marah in reference to his farm equipment inventions. “I got old and tired of doing everything by hand. Maybe if I was easier to get along with, I wouldn’t have to build so many one-man machines,” he chuckled.
One of Larry’s favorite original machines is a self-propelled post driver. “With the tractor, you have to be on and off all the time. It really takes two people to drive posts. Here, it’s a one-man band,” he explained. “I just wanted to see if I could do it. There was no blueprint or anything else. I just had an idea in my head. I had a picture in my mind and it turned out fairly close, but any time you’re putting something together, you don’t know exactly how this is going to work, or how that’s going to work. I wasn’t planning on having a transmission. That was an afterthought. I had to find a place to put it. I’m glad that I did because I needed the different speeds. I’d hunt around and find something that would work here, use it, find something that would work there, and there were a few surprises along. Some things I thought would just go together real easy was the harder part of it. The hydraulics are the only thing that is new. All the rest of it is what I had on hand.”  
Larry said building the machine was “a winter project”, taking about three months. “To start out with, I knew the post driver would work because I had it for the tractor. The buggy part of it is what I wanted to see whether it would work or not. I just took what parts I had, to see if I could make the buggy operate like I wanted to. When I saw the buggy would operate, that’s when I started putting it all together. What took so long was just finding what parts would work.”
The self-propelled post driver is made entirely of recycled materials. “It all came out of the junk pile,” Larry said. “It’s just made from parts from here, there and yonder. It has a Hercules engine that was thrown away. It has parts of an ’88 Plymouth Voyager, a Massey Ferguson combine. The main framework is an old trailer house frame. The running gears are from two separate International trucks. The toolboxes are military gas cans – just whatever I had lying around.”
“It swivels 90 degrees and runs in and out. It tilts forward and backward and sideways. That’s all hydraulic. The wheels are hydraulic-driven also. It’s four-wheel drive and four-wheel steer. The only thing the engine runs is the hydraulic pump. The hydraulic pump powers everything else,” described Larry.
“We can drive a 10-foot post with it. One safety feature it has is a parking or emergency brake. If you happen to bust a hose or anything comes loose, you just free-wheel. I did put a backup manual brake on it, which I have used a time or two. On fairly flat ground, I can run in high gear. It will go just at a good fast walk. The rougher and steeper the ground, the lower you have to go. When you put it down in the granny gear, it goes real slow. But it will handle a pretty steep hill, too,” Larry went on to say.
The driver is helpful for driving pipe corners or T-posts. “Not only do I drive my pipe corners, I also use it driving T-posts. I just swing it around and down beside the fence. You don’t have the forward and backward,” Larry said.
Larry has been well-satisfied with the unique piece of self-designed equipment. “There’s always room for improvement, but really, I have changed very little,” he stated. “I have been surprised at how little I have changed and how few breakdowns I’ve had. I figured that any time you put something together, there’d be a weak spot here or a weak spot there, but it has served me nicely. I built it several posts ago.”
“I have made a lot of things in my life, but this pretty much outdoes all of them,” Larry mused. “I came by (building equipment) honestly. Years ago, Dad made a post driver. He was really proud of it and took somebody down to show it to them and the person told him he had seen one of those on the market. Dad never had seen one of them, but he made one. My brother, Terry, still has it and uses it. That was 40-some years ago. Whether this one will be around 40-some years, I do not know.”
Larry is known for his philosophy that fits today’s eco-friendly movement: “You don’t want to throw anything away. Most people think I’ve got a lot of junk around here, but it’s not junk, it’s just parts waiting to be assembled.”