September 10, 2009

View of the day-The old 'header shuffle'. Al straps down our hurtin' pickup head on the trailer, while we get to use Kim's header to finish the job at Kisbey.

Al was up early rearranging headers on the trailer...Kim was good enough to let us use his pickup head since he was straight cutting wheat, so he brought his combine back to the yard after unhooking his straight head out at the field. After taking our straight head off the trailer then putting the pickup head on the trailer for us, his work was done...for us anyway.

We took the header out to the field and swapped it out with the broken one, then Al took the truck to the the bins to dump and Marilyn commenced to combining. We finished the first field then moved over to the last piece we had to do. The combine was having some random power issues...rpms would drop down and the alarms would go off and Marilyn wasn't even in a heavy swath. All the belts were fine, the rads were clean, so we chalked it up to fuel filters...and of course the new ones were in the shop trailer at Carlyle.

After Al had an empty truck for Marilyn, he took the header back to Carlyle and brought back the new filters. Marilyn just took it easy and it seemed to work just fine...until just before Al showed up with the filters...like the combine somehow knew they were coming. Al decided this time to change both filters instead of just the water separator one...which is the easier one that usually gets swapped when there are power issues...most likely because the one in the engine compartment requires being a contortionist...for some reason that engine compartment has shrunk in this newer combine...and it is damn hot!

We got the filters looked after and the combine ran like a top for the rest of the field. The farmer passed through with his rig...he was working on organic oats while we were on the organic wheat. After we finished both fields we went to the yard to get fueled up, since up here in Canada the farmer supplies the fuel. We had quite a lot of time to kill because the fuel tanks are just about the same height as the combine tank and while we waited we noticed a pickup truck that had passed on the highway had stopped, backed up and pulled in the yard.

The young man that got out was the grandson of the custom harvester that Al had started his cutting career with back in 1989. We had a chance to catch up while we fueled, it was a nice visit and it was good to see him again.

Marilyn took Al back to the General at the field and then dropped the pickup off at the bins before driving the combine back to Carlyle. Once Al had the General dumped he came back to Carlyle in the pickup and then we started the header shuffle all over again...getting Kim's taken off, the straight one put on the trailer and the sick header back on the combine. Marilyn thinks we need one more header trailer to avoid all the switcheroos.

We took the outside pickup belt off the header to try and get to the spot where the two breaks were. There were no mobile welders available, so Kim has volunteered to try and fix it since he had to do the same thing to his header last year...let's hope there isn't too much swearing.

The sky was cloudy all day and those clouds were building into something all around us. It sprinkled a bit after we got back to the yard but it looked like the worst of it was going to the east...and it was getting progressively worse as the night wore on.

Let's hope it is well past us and we can make some more dust tomorrow...