August 21,2013

View of the day-The train was in town, so the elevator was emptied out and they were cleaning up the wheat pile across from the motel.

The day was a lot cooler, hardly getting to 85º, but we did have a good east wind...if an east wind can be good. The humidity was high to start with, but came down in a hurry and we were out of the camper by 10.

We got out to the field, got serviced and were combining by 11:30. It was more of the same, with Al running the cart, but there was a bit of a slowdown in the trucking.  

There was another crew working on some of the wheat that was laying down really bad. This crew was using a stripper head so that there wouldn't be a lot of residue...straw and chaff...left behind.  If we would have been cutting, we would have had to almost mow the wheat right to the ground and with the high yield, there would have been a solid mat of material which would have caused a nightmare to the seeding equipment. It just wouldn't have cut through the mat.

There was a problem at the bins with one of the augers, so between working on the auger and trying to get all the trucks unloaded from both crews, he was having a time of it. We never had to stop the combine...to wait on a truck, anyways.

Halfway up the field, Marilyn heard an alarm going off, but there were no lights, no strange sounds, all the gauges were normal, she couldn't figure out what the problem was. Until she saw a tiny little bar flashing on the picture of the combine. Something was wrong with the straw spreaders on the back of the machine.

Al came over with the tractor to see what the deal was and after we took one of the shields off, we could see the whole belt tensioner arm was laying in the bottom of the shield. This is what it should have looked like.

We could see that the shaft that was welded into the plate on the side of the combine, that held the unit on through the smaller pulleys had broken off. 

We called the farmer to find a welder in town, got the plate taken off the combine and took what we needed in to get buzzed.

We were able to get it fixed right away and he only charged us $6! We took it back out to the field, reassembled it, tested it out...good as new. Back to combining, after losing a couple of hours.

We quit just at sundown...we had run out of space and the straw was getting raggy again. As with every night we have combined, Al drops Marilyn off at the camper and runs into Java to get fuel for the combine. When we got back to town, the pile of wheat had been cleaned right up...like it was never there.

Even with the breakdown, we still managed to get 90 acres done...