Two Farmers Laughed When a 16-Year-Old Girl Bought 22 “Worthless” Leaf Springs for $4.30—Then She Forged 69 Hay-Rake Tines, and a Veteran Farmer Put Them to the Test…

That summer, Marin Voss turned 16.

She spent $4.30 on a pile of cracked leaf springs that the Dietrich brothers had pulled off their flatbed and stacked behind the co-op in Harland County, Nebraska, because they had nowhere else to put them and no use for them whatsoever.

This was June of 1961.

The brothers had laughed when she asked the price—not cruelly, but in the way men laugh when they are not quite sure whether to be embarrassed for someone or for themselves.

And Curtis Dietrich, the older one, had said she could have the whole lot for $4, and he would throw in the extra 30 cents of scrap wire she was eyeing if she hauled it herself before Friday.

Marin said that was fine and drove her father’s ’54 Chevy pickup to the back of the co-op the next morning, which was a Tuesday, and loaded every spring by hand.

There were 22 of them. They ranged from 32 inches to 47 inches in length.

Each one cracked somewhere along its curve, which was why the Dietrichs had pulled them and why no one else had touched them.

She stacked them in the bed, covered them with a piece of canvas and drove the 11 miles back to her family’s place on County Road 14 without telling anyone what she planned to do with them.

Her father, Rutger Voss, was a man who had built his operation on the principle that the most useful things in any county were the ones everybody else had decided were finished.

He farmed 240 acres of dryland ground south of Alma, ran a small cow-calf pair on the back 40, and kept a shop behind the house that was organized by the year things had come into it so that if you knew when something had been acquired, you could find it in the dark.

He had taught Marin to weld when she was 11, not because he thought she would need it, but because he thought everyone should know how heat and metal behaved together.

He had a Lincoln welder that he had bought, used from a retired implement man in 1953 for $38, and it sat on a cart with rubber wheels so it could be moved to wherever the work was.

The shop had a concrete floor, a single south-facing window and a pegboard wall on which every tool had an outline drawn in black marker so you could see at a glance what was missing.

Marin had added her own section of pegboard at the far end when she was 12, and she kept it in the same order.

Rutger looked at the springs in the truck bed that Tuesday evening without saying anything for a long time.

He picked one up, flexed it with both hands to feel where the crack was, and set it down.

He said, “What are you going to do with them?” Marin said she was going to make hay tines.

He looked at her again, this time with the expression he used when he was deciding whether a thing was worth discussing or whether it was already decided, and he said, “You’ll need to know the temper.”

She said she knew. He said, “All right,” and went back to the house.

The hay tine problem in Harland County in 1961 was this: The hay rakes and tedders that most operators ran used tines made from spring steel, and the tines broke.

They broke because the hay ground in that part of Nebraska was rough and because operators pushed their equipment harder than the manufacturers had tested for, and because a replacement tine from the dealer in Alma cost 47 cents apiece, and you could lose six or eight of them in a single cutting if the ground was bad.

The Dietrich brothers went through tines the way other people went through baling wire.

So did the Scoggan family north of town and the Halverson operation east of the river, and a dozen others.

The dealer, a man named Gordon Pedabone, who ran the implement lot on the west side of Alma, kept a bin of replacement tines behind his counter and restocked it every spring.

He sold them at 47 cents and made a reasonable margin and considered the matter settled.

What Marin understood—because her father had shown her and because she had spent two winters reading every metallurgy pamphlet she could find at the county library—was that the cracked springs behind the co-op were not finished metal.

They were cracked in one place, which meant the rest of the steel was intact, and they were made from 5160 chromium vanadium alloy, which was a better grade of spring steel than what the manufacturer used in the replacement tines Pedabone sold.

The manufactured tines were made from a softer alloy that flexed well when new, but fatigued faster under repeated impact.

The spring steel in a leaf spring was designed to flex and return tens of thousands of times without losing its memory.

A cracked spring had lost the use of its crack, not the use of its steel.

If you cut it into blanks on either side of the crack, annealed them carefully, formed them to the tine profile, and re-tempered them correctly, you would have a tine with more fatigue life than the factory part.

This was not a theory Marin had arrived at on her own.

It was a theory her father had mentioned once briefly while they were fixing a rake together in the spring of 1959, and which she had spent two years thinking about before she did anything with it.

She started on a Wednesday morning in the second week of June before the heat came up.

The shop was cool enough at 6:00 in the morning that she could work without the fan, and she liked the quiet of it, the way the tools were where she had left them and the light came in low and yellow through the south window.

She had already measured the tine profile from a factory replacement she had bought from Pedabone for 47 cents, tracing it onto a piece of cardboard and cutting it out to use as a template.

The profile was a compound curve wider at the base, tapering to a point with a specific bend angle at the attachment end that mated with the rake’s tine bar.

She had measured the bend angle with a protractor: 22°.

She had written this in her notebook, which she kept on a shelf above her pegboard section, along with the target dimensions: Overall length: 7 and 3/8 inches.

Base width: 9/16 of an inch. Thickness: 3/16. The first step was to cut the springs into blanks.

She used a hacksaw for this, working slowly along a scribed line, because the steel was hard enough that a fast cut would wander.

Each spring gave her between four and seven usable blanks, depending on where the crack fell.

She kept a tally in her notebook.

After 3 days of cutting, she had 91 blanks from the 22 springs, and she had gone through four hacksaw blades at 11 cents apiece, which was 44 cents in blades.

She wrote that down.

Annealing was done in the shop’s coal forge, which her father had bought at an estate sale in 1947 for $12, and which he maintained with the same attention he gave everything else.

Marin brought each blank up to a bright cherry red which, on 5160 steel, was approximately 1,475° F, and held it there for 2 minutes before burying it in the ash bucket to cool slowly overnight.

Slow cooling was what removed the hardness and made the steel workable.

She did 12 blanks at a time, which was as many as she could manage in the forge’s firepot, and she ran four annealing sessions across two weeks.

The coal cost her father $14 for the winter’s supply and she was using perhaps a dollar and a half of it for her work, which she noted in the ledger she was keeping on the inside front cover of her notebook.

Forming came next.

She made a bending jig from a piece of half-inch plate steel that she found in the scrap corner of the shop, drilling two holes and tapping them for the stop bolts, then scribing the tine profile onto the plate surface so she could bend each blank to the same shape.

The plate cost her nothing because it was scrap.

The bolts were from a coffee can of sorted hardware on the third shelf from the left, and she replaced them from her own money at the hardware store in Alma: 32 cents for the lot.

Each blank went into the forge again, this time just to a low red, about 1,200°, which was enough to make it pliable without burning the carbon out of the surface.

She formed the attachment bend, first pressing the hot blank over the jig stop bolt with a flat hammer, checking the angle with her protractor, correcting if needed.

Then the body curve, which she formed over the horn of the anvil.

Then the taper at the tip, which she drew out with the cross peen.

She checked every finished form against her cardboard template before setting it aside.

Anything that did not match went back to the forge.

By the end of the fourth week, she had 73 formed tines, 18 having been scrapped for cracks that opened during forming or profiles that she could not bring within tolerance.

She wrote down 73. She wrote down the scrap count. She did not throw the scrapped pieces away.

She put them in a separate pile to see if any of them could be salvaged for a shorter application.

Hardening and tempering were the steps that would determine whether the tines were better than the factory parts or just different.

Hardening meant bringing each tine to a full orange heat—about 1,550°—and quenching it in oil.

She used a 5-gallon bucket of used motor oil that her father had drained from the truck, which cost nothing.

The quench was fast, in and out in 3 seconds, the oil smoking and the steel going from orange to black in the time it took to count.

After quenching, the steel was hard but brittle, which meant it would snap under impact rather than flex.

Tempering drew some of that hardness back out in a controlled way, leaving the steel hard enough to hold its shape but resilient enough to flex without fracturing.

She tempered in the kitchen oven because it held a steady temperature better than the forge, and her mother, Selma Voss, had agreed to this arrangement on the condition that Marin cleaned the oven afterward each time.

The tempering temperature for a hay tine needed to be around 800° F to hit the hardness range she wanted, but a kitchen oven only went to 550°.

She did what she could, with the oven running at its maximum for 45 minutes per batch, then finished the tempering cycle in the forge by color, watching for the straw to purple progression on the steel surface and pulling each tine when it reached a consistent blue-purple at the tip and a straw color at the base.

This was the part that required the most attention and the most judgment.

She ruined four tines getting the color reading right, and then she did not ruin anymore.

Selma watched the process from the kitchen doorway on the third tempering day without saying anything for several minutes.

She was a careful woman who expressed support by not interrupting, and she expressed doubt the same way.

So Marin had learned to read which silence she was in. This one was support.

When she finally spoke, she said, “How many do you have?” Marin said, “69.”

Selma said, “And you think they’re better?”

Marin said she thought they were better and that she would know for certain when someone used them.

Selma said, “All right,” and went back to what she had been doing.

Marin finished the last of the 69 tines on a Saturday in mid-July.

She’d been at the work for 6 weeks, fitting it around the farm chores that were hers in the summer, the morning milking and the afternoon water check and the twice-weekly hauling of whatever needed hauling.

She had not told anyone outside the family what she was doing, partly because she had not decided yet whether they were worth telling about and partly because she was not sure anyone would understand the explanation.

The co-op counter was not a place where the metallurgy of 5160 chromium vanadium alloy came up often.

She laid the 69 tines out on the shop workbench and looked at them.

They were not pretty in the way that store-bought things are pretty.

They had the slight surface variation that comes from handwork, a texture rather than a finish, and the color was the dark blue-gray of well-tempered steel rather than the bright zinc of a plated factory part.

They were the right shape. They were the right dimensions.

She checked six of them at random against her cardboard template and all six were within a 16th of an inch on every measurement.

She checked the attachment bend angle on 12 of them with the protractor and all 12 were between 21 and 23°.

She put the template away. The cost ledger on the inside front cover of her notebook read as follows: Springs—$4.30.

Hacksaw blades—44 cents. Jig bolts—32 cents. Factory tine for template—47 cents. Coal estimated—$1.50. Motor oil—nothing. Oven use—nothing by agreement.

Total $6.03. 69 tines at $6.03 was 8 and 7/10 cents per tine.

Gordon Pedabone sold his at 47 cents apiece. She did not go to Pedabone.

She was not interested in the implement dealer.

What she was interested in was whether the tines worked, and the only way to find that out was to put them on a rake and cut hay with them until they either broke or didn’t.

She asked her father if she could replace the tines on his number 12 side-delivery rake with her own.

He said yes.

She pulled the factory tines, counted them—there were 31—and installed 31 of her tines in their place, using the same bolts and the same torque.

She put the remaining 38 in a cardboard box on the shelf above her pegboard.

Rutger Voss cut hay with that rake for the rest of the 1961 season, which meant three cuttings across the south meadow and the two east fields on the Angle place, approximately 68 acres of ground in total.

The ground on the Angle place was rough, with a hardpan ridge running through the middle of the north field that caught equipment on the downstroke and had broken tines on every rake that had ever worked it.

At the end of the third cutting, Rutger pulled the rake into the shop and Marin pulled every tine and laid them on the workbench.

None of them were broken.

Two had a slight set, meaning they had taken a permanent bend from an impact, but both were still within a functional profile and both were still attached.

She measured them against the template. She wrote down the results.

She did not say anything to anyone at the co-op or the feed store or anywhere else that fall.

She put the tines back on the rake. She went back to school.

The story that traveled through Harland County that summer was not about the tines.

It was about the Voss girl spending $4 on a pile of cracked springs and loading them herself, which Curtis Dietrich had mentioned at the co-op counter because he found it amusing, and which had traveled from the co-op to the feed store to the Halverson place in the way that small, slightly puzzling stories travel in a county where everyone knows what everyone else paid for things.

The version of the story at the feed store had her making jewelry.

The version at the Halverson place had her making fence staples.

Nobody had the right version because nobody had asked her and she had not told anyone.

By the following spring, Marin was 17 and she had spent the winter making more tines.

She had sourced three more lots of cracked springs: eight from a farmer named Osgood Jagger, who had a pile of them behind his machine shed and was glad to be rid of them for a dollar and a half; 11 from the salvage yard at the south end of Alma at 20 cents apiece, $2.20; and four from a road grader that the county had retired and parted out, which she bought from the county road supervisor for 50 cents the lot.

The new springs gave her a better range of lengths and she was getting faster at the work.

Her cut-to-tine yield had improved from the first batch’s 73% to 81%, because she had gotten better at reading where a spring’s metallurgy was compromised and cutting around it rather than through it.

She made 112 tines over the winter, working two evenings a week and most of Saturday mornings.

Her cost per tine on the second batch was six and two-tenths cents because she was buying springs cheaper and wasting less.

In March of 1962, she drove to the Scoggan place north of town and asked to speak with Neil Scoggan, who ran the largest hay operation in that part of the county—410 acres of his own ground, plus whatever he could lease—and who went through tines the way other people went through coffee.

She had 30 tines in the cardboard box on the passenger seat and her notebook on top of the box.

Neil Scoggan was a large, deliberate man who had been farming since before Marin’s father was farming, and he looked at her across his kitchen table with the expression of a person who has decided how much of his morning to give to something.

She put six tines on the table.

She told him what they were made from, where the steel had come from and what she had done to it.

She told him the cost.

She told him what had happened on the Voss place’s Angle ground, which he knew was rough because he had raked next to it.

She said she would like him to try 30 of them on one of his rakes for a season and that if they broke before the factory tines did, she would replace them at no charge.

Neil Scoggan picked up one of the tines and flexed it between his hands.

He looked at it for a moment. He put it down and said, “All right.” That was all he said.

Marin left 30 tines and drove home.

The Scoggan operation ran three side-delivery rakes across 410 acres and leased ground in a county where the hay cutting season ran from late May through early September.

Four cuttings in a good year, three in a dry one.

Neil put Marin’s tines on the number 16 rake, the one that worked the roughest ground, and ran it all summer.