October 19, 2014

View of the day-Got to walk past this on the back road by our place...a lot of happy ducks in there.

Today held such promise...sunny, warm, windy...perfect harvest weather. We were out at the field and making dust before 10:30am looking to get at least 80 acres done. We had to scale back from 100 due to the move down the road to a new field and the constant backing up near the sloughs so we wouldn't get stuck.

We finished the last of yesterday's field, then moved to the the new field. This one was a full quarter...minus all the sloughs we had to go around. Marilyn made the first round and this field seemed to be running a lot better than the last one...the feeder kept getting plugged, so it was slow going for a while.

Al had to get the auger moved to a new bin and once he got it set and shut everything off, he heard...nothing. Where was the roar of the combine?

Marilyn had plugged the feeder and used the reverser to get the wad out from under the auger in the header, but when she tried to get the header started, the auger wouldn't turn forward. She couldn't see what the issue was, because she had to be sitting in the seat for the front end to run, so she waited for Al to come back.

Once we surveyed the situation, we discovered the pulley was turning but the shaft it was on, wasn't. We got the pulley off and thankfully the shaft was still fine...the grooves were almost like new, as you can see from the picture. The pulley, however was another story.

We had a good look at the pulley and you could see the problem right away. There were supposed to be matching grooves where it fit on the shaft and this one was as smooth as if it belonged on a round shaft. It couldn't have been machined better.

We tried to get the pulley apart from the bearing, since we didn't need the whole kit. Of course, even though we had the shop trailer with us, getting the bearing off was going to be a task. Al called his friend Danny, who was working out in the field around 10 miles north and he met us at his out door shop to do some dividing. He came up with a plan and the bearing was out in no time at all.

Tomorrow we need to find parts...