View of the day-Everything changed, loaded and ready to go in the cold blustery weather. Sunflower header where it belongs and the combine loaded and ready to roll on Sunday.
Another early day with lots on the list of things to do. We went hooked up the shop trailer to take to Stockholm to get the combine changed over for sunflowers. It was looking like a miserable day was in store, and we weren't disappointed...oh wait...it was miserable and we were disappointed. It was cold, rainy and windy all day, there didn't seem to be any place to get out of the wind...it was just awful and it never let up.
We got out to the farm, unloaded the combine and while Marilyn tried to blow the chaff, straw and dust off the combine...in the rain...Al got the grain truck box cleaned out and filled up the fluid levels on it. With the shields off the rotor compartment, an attempt was made to get all the lingering dust blown out so we could work at changing out the concaves from small wire to large wire. The job is relatively easy...if you remember to take the middle one of the three out first to eliminate the jam up that happens in the confined space inside the big tire.
After we got the old concaves out and had the new ones ready to install, they went in with just a bit of persuasion...that was one job off the list. We had to take the pickup head off the combine, pick up the straight header off the Bergen header trailer then go to Esterhazy to get the sunflower header from the farmers field. After a quick visit to the accountant, another pit stop for lunch, we got the header hooked up and went back the 10 miles to where the equipment was sitting.
The sunflower header is an older style 810 Case straight cut header with sunflower pans attached and the reels replaced with a spiked drum, which you can sort of see from the view of the day. The header was made to go on a combine that doesn't have a step on the feeder house, so we had a couple of holes cut in underneath the top ledge to accommodate the step brackets on our rig. This makes picking the thing up somewhat of a challenge, since you have to be lined up perfectly to pick it up. Also, the top platform on the header is about 18 inches (you metric babies can convert it yourselves) as opposed to the 5 inches on the present headers which means you can't really see where the feeder house is as you creep forward to pick it up.
We had to unload the sunflower header off the black home built header trailer, which is fine for short runs, and move it over to the Bergen trailer, which is a much beefier header trailer. Because the headers are built slightly different , the brackets that hold the headers are different, also they don't line up. After a presto chango of the brackets, the sunflower header was ready to go on the Bergen, the straight header was loaded onto the homebuilt for winter storage and the pickup head was back on the combine.
After getting the combine loaded and hooked up to the truck, we were able to officially call it a day. We parked the straight header, hooked up the shop trailer and pointed north to Yorkton. We got back in time for Al to thaw out, have a swish, grab his pink scarf and head out to the Terriers hockey game.
His Terriers haven't been doing to good so far this season and tonight's game was in town against their arch rivals from down #10 highway, the Melville Millionaires. The Mills have gone undefeated this season, so it was sure to be an exciting game and at the time of this entry the game ended with the Terriers knocking the Mills off their winning streak with a 3-0 score. They go to Melville tomorrow night for the rematch, and with a couple of fights that broke out tonight, it should be a nail biter.
Oh yeah, Al had to wear something pink to support breast cancer, the team had pink jerseys and everyone was supposed to wear something pink. Marilyn checked out Walmart to see if they had anything pink in the men's department...a tie for $15 that Al would never wear again...she did have an eight foot pink scarf that did the job.
Pink is not Al's color...well, except for the stripes on the Freighliner...
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