October 14, 2010

View of the day-The combine waits across the great divide for a productive day.

Back to work...that's right, we didn't get stuck today.

Al went out first thing to survey the other side of the field to see if there was a way he could load the General closer to the bins. After finding a flat enough spot to take the cart across, we got everything set into position, serviced the combine and started making dust.

Marilyn made a point of leaving one swath around all the sloughs so there was no chance of any surprises and that resulted in a successful day of combining. About mid afternoon, Marilyn noticed that the chaff she was leaving looked suspiciously like it did in Texas when the spreader had dropped off. She stopped to check out the back of the combine and both spreaders were on and turning, so she continued on until Al made it back to the field. When he checked out the back of the moving combine he could see that now, the right spreader was not turning and there was a pile of chaff riding on it, so Marilyn pulled over to check it out.

After taking the shields off, we discovered that the top of the spreader hex shaft had rounded off, so the gear was spinning freely on the end instead of turning the shaft and spreader...so we ended up running with only one spreader for the rest of the day. Al called to see if he could get the parts so we could replace them tomorrow and found out the only place that had them was in the USA...guess we wait.

We were getting close to seeing the end of the field...we think...but as the sun and the wind went down, it was getting a lot harder to find a swath that didn't have swather ruts on either side. Al decided to fill the General and call it a night...we should easily finish tomorrow.

And then the final cleaning starts...