October 13

View of the day-An overhead shot of the sunflower header ready for action. Taken from on top of the combine cab.

Al was up early to work in the fog first thing...another instance of people blaming us for bringing the wet weather. It stayed cloudy and foggy most of the day, although we did see the sun for about 30 minutes shortly before it was to set. Once Marilyn made the scene, it was off to the bustling metropolis of Pingree to see if we could get omelets at 30 minutes to lunch time at the community run cafe. Usually they cut off the breakfast run around 10am, but Al was able to sweet talk the waitress/cook into breaking tradition and building us some eggs. It really didn't take a lot of talking...that's the great thing about a small town community cafe.

After breakfast we went out to get the combine set up for sunflowers, and fixed the few things that had gone wrong at the end of the small grains season. Marilyn went right to work trying to get the header raise to work when moving forward. After taking the console off and checking to see if there were any wires touching or worn out, it was obvious it wouldn't be the easy way out. We checked to see if the controllers on the feeder house had somehow seized up, but they were working like new...another dead end. Finally we decided to try the new switch we had bought back home in Canada. The propulsion lever has an inch and a half diameter handle that is about one foot long and it has four bundles of wires running from the handset to the bottom of the console...which means threading the new one through the tight quarters was going to be a chore. We though we would hook up the wires outside the handle just in case that wasn't the problem and we would have wasted our time trying to get the thing threaded. Once we made sure the problem would be solved by replacing the switch...a number of short jaunts around the yard raising and lowering the feederhouse with the front end running...we ran a scrap piece of tie wire up through the handle and tied it to the bottom of the switch wires...home free!

One job out of the way, but...once we started the combine up and set throttle in the low idle detent, it was running quite a bit faster than it usually did. After checking to make sure nothing had been altered by the removal of the console, we decided to shut it off...it wouldn't...shut off, that is...it just kept chugging, and we couldn't throttle up either. After a quick check in the engine compartment we could see the end of the throttle cable had broken off. Al called up to Carrington to see if they had a new cable and, yes, they had what we needed. We left everything where it sat and ran in to get what we needed before they closed.

Back at the combine, we got the cable repaired, the console back where it belonged, the header attached, greased and chans lubed...a darn productive day all in all, considering we couldn't combine. Back in the house, Marilyn had to do some dish tech work so Al could watch his baseball playoffs, then did a cleanup on the in house computer so the blog could get posted earlier than 1am for a change.

It always starts with good intentions...