Brick press

My parents live on a farm.
To answer your first question, there are no cows, no chickens, just dogs and some wild critters.
To answer your second question, we grow wheat, milo, and the occasional soybean.
To answer your third question, milo is mostly used as animal feed.

None of that is what I want to talk about. We have renters in the old farmhouse. A little while back one of their kids needed to make a brick for school. He went to my dad for some help. They got straw and mud and some other stuff, made forms, and I believe they even baked it. The kid's brick rocked the classroom.

My question was why they didn't use the old brick forms that I'd seen years before. The obvious answer was that they didn't know where they were. This subject burned at me for awhile. There's some great old stuff on the farm that I've been trying to bring in and clean up. So when I was there a few weeks ago I went looking for the brick forms. Dad also explained what the strange object behind the shop building is. I spent years thinking it some form of press. It is, but instead of letters it presses bricks.

It's the piece of rusty metal in the middle.

Wait. What is that word?

Wow, when I see that word I am not thinking about bricks.
It actually refers to Climax Machine Company, now Climax Portable Machine Tools.

Here is one side of one of the brick plates presented along with some bricks that were made with it. It's still a perfect fit.

Could use some cleaning, however.

From what I'm told, the bricks in those last few pictures were made by my great grandmother. When dealing with farm work you sometimes have to throw out the concept of woman's work.

We didn't get to this until late on my last evening, however. Otherwise I would have drug the brick press into a building and started cleaning and oiling it.

I keep meaning to contact the Climax Company and see what they can tell me about it. What parts are missing, how to use it, care and feeding, etc.

Eventually, what I hope to do is use it. There is a barn that needs to be replaced. OK, there are several, but I have a specific one in mind. I'd like to put down 3 or 4 rows of brick at the base of the new wall. It'd make the new barn match some of the other buildings better and keep rot and termites from eating the very bottom.