Being kinda dumb never stopped any idea from being good. I don’t know about this one though.
Combines are called that cause they combine a lot of the steps of harvesting into one machine. They cut the stalk and remove the grain from all the non-grain parts of the plant. That’s a lot of moving parts that all require a decent amount of force, that would all have to be driven by the pedals. I don’t know a ton about combines having never used one myself, but I think a lot of those processes benefit from being scaled up, that is, it’s more energy efficient per plant to build a machine that can process 50 plants at a time than one that can only handle 5, so you wouldn’t gain as much scaling down as you might expect. You could maybe build something that works, technically, but I imagine it would be less of a casual hang and more of a continuous, difficult workout for a team of professional cyclists.
If you wanted to chill and have a drink with friends, you could winnow your grain the old-fashioned(ish) way: you just need to dump your grain out in a stiff breeze. If you have a fan and a hopper, you could just sit around and chat while the hopper empties, and add another bin of grain every few minutes.
![[OC] Dust, diesel, and wheat. A combine harvester at work](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5d1cc664-5ad4-425e-bc1b-94ffb74082c2.png){kind=link}
Being kinda dumb never stopped any idea from being good. I don’t know about this one though.
Combines are called that cause they combine a lot of the steps of harvesting into one machine. They cut the stalk and remove the grain from all the non-grain parts of the plant. That’s a lot of moving parts that all require a decent amount of force, that would all have to be driven by the pedals. I don’t know a ton about combines having never used one myself, but I think a lot of those processes benefit from being scaled up, that is, it’s more energy efficient per plant to build a machine that can process 50 plants at a time than one that can only handle 5, so you wouldn’t gain as much scaling down as you might expect. You could maybe build something that works, technically, but I imagine it would be less of a casual hang and more of a continuous, difficult workout for a team of professional cyclists.
If you wanted to chill and have a drink with friends, you could winnow your grain the old-fashioned(ish) way: you just need to dump your grain out in a stiff breeze. If you have a fan and a hopper, you could just sit around and chat while the hopper empties, and add another bin of grain every few minutes.