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Southeast Washington | My most redneck thing I will admit to was putting a window air conditioner into a combine.
We used to raise seed peas and sometimes three varieties. Instead of cleaning the combine up for each variety we had three combines so each for one variety. One was an older hillside Gleaner MH3 that was basically a spare so depending on varieties planted it might not even be fired up some years. Anyway it ran the old R12 refrigerant in it. At first you could charge it and last through several days of harvesting its varieties of peas. Then it got worse and worse and wouldn't make it through the day. Once we used up the R12 that we had left that was the end of it because it was just too prohibitively expensive to but any more and that was the last machine we had using R12.
Anyway not knowing when or if the combine was going to run for harvesting peas I didn't want to put much money into it or spend money on a service call once I was out of R12. Ended up buying a $79 5000 btu window air conditioner and put in it by removing the right side window and clamping it in with some channel iron that was from the combine threshing area. Then duct taped in some plexiglass above it to cover the remaining hole. At first I hooked up an inverter to try running it and it would run almost half a day before it ran the batteries down too muchand stop working. The update was a 5000 watt Honda generator out on the top step and an extension cord coming in the door to the AC unit. It worked perfectly like that for 3 years until we stopped raising seed peas. The biggest benefit was you could be near electricity at a shed and plug it in to cool the cab without even having to fire up the engine.
I felt the $79 unit was cheaper than a service calland parts to update to R134a. I had a JD connection and leaked him some photos to see if JD would copy it. They didn't.
Here are some pictures I found of that combine.
Edited by Glenn W. 5/7/2026 20:02
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 FB_IMG_1775152640894 (full).jpg (172KB - 8 downloads)
FB_IMG_1775152629284 (full).jpg (190KB - 8 downloads)
FB_IMG_1775152614209 (full).jpg (159KB - 8 downloads)
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Do you ever do any super redneck stuff to keep from spending money?
