September 1

View of the day-The cavalry saves the day!

Well here we go again...the lightning was flashing and then the rain came around 2am. It rained a couple more times during the night, so Al had his sign. Marilyn's theory was that if it rained, the repair on yesterday's breakdown would be major...and if it didn't rain, the fix would be quick. Funny how things work.

We discovered the belt was not wrapped twice around the pulley...no indeed...it was more like seven times. We tried hooking some of the remnants to a chain and pulling with the pickup, that worked for one of the strands, but the rest were wrapped so badly that some of the fibers had pushed against the oil seal and there was a pretty heavy leak. We decided the only way to get it fixed was to remove the gear box, pulleys and all.

Since the rain has quashed any thoughts of combining, in the morning anyway, we had extra help in the form of brother-in-law Kim, nephew Gordie(who was the photographer of the day), and the farmer, Garrett. Kim called into his CaseIH dealer to see if we could get the seal replaced on a Saturday, and they told him they would be able to help us out. That was the least of our problems at that point.

The gear box weighed about 500 lbs. so lifting it out of the engine compartment was going to be a bit of a chore. We got all the bolts out that were holding it down, looped a couple of heavy ropes around it and tried to budge it. We budged it right off the platform and under a small gear, which made removal even further off. Garrett then suggested he go home and get his backhoe...BACKHOE...what a lifesaver! Once that showed up, he hooked a chain hoist to the the bucket and ever so gently lifted the gear box out and on to the back of our pickup.

We drove the 45 miles to Storthoaks to get it gutted, and after they cleaned it up and removed the sheaves, the remnants just pulled right off. They changed the seal and and we decided to change some pins and bushings since the pulley half was off anyway. They reassembled it and we were on our way back.

Kim was combining on his canola, so we were a body short, but Garrett used the backhoe to replace the gear box and helped get it bolted back down. We were just ready to bolt up the PTO shaft when we realized that the sprockets that speed up the rotor were not lined up...they weren't even close. They had put that together backwards!

We finally got it put together the right way and after getting it all set the way it was, Al took it out for a test drive around 6:30pm. Marilyn took over after Al got the truck full and combined until 9:30pm. A 25 acre day, which wasn't that bad considering we didn't think we would get going at all.

What a great start to September...