July 30, 2010

View of the day-Marilyn works on getting another coat of paint on the header trailer parts.

We woke up to thick fog which, sometimes, is worse than rain. We knew we wouldn't be combining, so Al went out to get the Green Sheet for some reading material and Marilyn found some laundry to do.

We had lunch in the camper, then Marilyn went out to buy some primer and paint to jazz up the brackets and bar that we had gotten for the header trailer. Al got the wire wheel out and took off the rust then Marilyn got busy priming.

The campers were leaving the RV park hot and heavy today, we must have lost 8 or 9 units. We have empty lots on either side of us now, so that is where we set up the paint shop. It was a good day to wait for paint to dry.

We figured we might as well see what kind of a catastrophe we could have trying to unload the header from the trailer. Al had quite a time with a combine and a couple of fork lifts when they loaded it at the dealership before we left, so we knew there would be issues...hence, the new brackets we had fabricated. We took the trailer up near the combine on a flat piece of the pasture, then unhooked the straight header from combine at the rye field and moved it down to the trailer.

Marilyn lined the combine up to the header and had the feederhouse in the opening on the header...so far, so good. Al told her to slowly take the weight off the trailer, then he would undo one of the two ratchet straps that were holding it onto the trailer. The first one went fine, then he loosened the second one and told Marilyn to raise the header...catastrophe as expected. The header was front heavy and it jumped off the feederhouse and was trying to flip right off the trailer, fortunately Al had not removed the last ratchet strap and it was keeping the header in place...sort of.

We surveyed the situation and figured if we could loop a ratchet strap through the opening on the header and tie it back to the feederhouse, maybe we could hold it long enought to get it off the trailer and onto the ground. We were half right. We were able to get the bottom latches hooked, but of course the top cradle was outside the opening instead of nicely tucked inside where it belonged. We ran the straps back to the axles of the big tires and it held like a dream while we backed away from the trailer....the trouble came when we tried to set it on the ground...the straps had no give when the feederhouse lowered and moved farther away from the axle. It didn't seem safe to snap them open with all that pressure on them.

We ended up putting one ratchet strap through the center of the header and out to either end of the feederhouse and that held long enough for us to loosen the other straps and get the header on the ground...then latched properly. We will have to rethink our loading procedure.

We ran the header to check that everything worked...it did, like a dream...then brought the header trailer into town and parked it in the camping spot next to the camper so we can get an early start on it tomorrow. It was buck a burger night at the VFW, so we went down to a packed house and got caught up on some of the town gossip, then came back to the camper so Al could watch his Canadian Football League game.

Hopefully we get the winter wheat done tomorrow...