July 12, 2010

View of the day-Making the first cut at Hamill, SD...and the rain stayed away.

We had decided to take a test at 1pm just to see how close it would be and since the day was overcast and there was rain to the south, we didn't hold out much hope.

Once Marilyn had the windows done, the header was hooked up to the pickup...even though it was only two miles out to the field, there were a couple of narrow spots, so we decided not to take any chances with the header on the combine. Just as we were moving out there was another harvest crew moving into town...it looked like the action would be starting in this area, real soon.

We did a test and the farmer took it into Winner to get it tested at the elevator...12.9%, we were good to go. We got the tractor and cart out to the field and it was cutting time. the farmer had hired a couple of semis to haul the wheat to Chamberlain, so Al was full time in the cart.

Marilyn had done about 35 acres when she heard a clicking noise coming from under the cab, upon inspection we discovered that one of the ribs on the 3 v belt that drives the feeder house had partially separated from the rest of the belt and had jumped over on the pulley so it was rubbing on the shield. Since the split was only about 24 inches, we got the belt back on track, wrote the part number down and continued cutting...it seemed to work just fine. Al had brought the shop trailer out to work on the batteries on the tractor which seemed to be giving him no end of troubles...starting it was beginning to be a crap shoot.

We finished the field and were going to call it a day since the elevator had closed and we didn't have another truck. Just as we were taking the shop trailer back into town, another semi showed up, so we left the shop and headed back to move to the next field. We got moved over and started to make the first round and Marilyn had gotten almost all the way around when she heard the clicking start again, but thought she would be able to get to the end of the field to check it out...wrong. This time the ripped part of the belt had sheared off and got under the cleaning fan belt which caused it to jump off.

We got the bad piece of belt out and put the cleaning fan belt back on, then figured we might as well try to run with only two ribs left on the belt...at least long enough to get the semi filled and on his way. The semi driver came out and gave us a hand getting everything put right...considering we didn't have the right metric tools and had to fake it. A curse goes out to either the tool guys who don't put a 15mm socket in their sets, or the machinery guys who use those 15mm bolts...yes, we know you can cheat with some of the regular sockets...but sometimes it works and sometimes your knuckles get skinned.

We filled the semi then Marilyn got a hopper in the cart and started on the next one...then the clicking started again. Taking no chances, she shut the feeder off and went back to the pickup...it was 9pm, time to quit anyway. Al drained the oil on the combine, which turned out to be a bit of a task in the dusk and since the combine is higher, or somebody wanted to save money on the plastic drain hose, we ended up with a bit of a mess since the hose wouldn't reach the bucket and there was too much wind for it to flow nicely into the hole.

Now we need to find a belt tomorrow...