July 2, 2011

View of the day-Working to beat the weather.

Al was away early to his auction sale…lots of little crap and an auctioneer that was dragging everything out wayyy to long. He was sure we could have combined all day and still made the end of the sale. He did manage to come home with 5 new toys…well, new to him.

Marilyn got to drive the General out to the field, and since she had done the servicing last night, was able to jump in the combine and get right back to work. After getting Kevin’s semi filled, she started working on filling the General and after a couple of dumps, could see the last 8 acres of the field coming together…until the cutter bar stopped.

Al was just getting back to the field, so he drove down to where the combine had stopped and it wasn’t good news. The spline on the knife drive had sheared off. We had never had this happen on any of the CaseIH wobble boxes, so we were shocked to see how it had snapped off and split down the middle…and of course, the warranty had run out in May. We called the MacDon support trailer and they did have a new wobble box…200 miles away in Goodland, fortunately they were able to get one of the guys to meet us half way with it. We were happy to see that it was the same gentleman that had helped us set the header up at Davidson, OK last year.

The clouds had been building all day and although it was only in the 90’s, without the wind, it felt worse than the 106º days. We raced back to the field to try and get everything put back together before the weather got nasty…hoping we could get it assembled so that the timing was correct and we wouldn’t have to re-do it.

We got everything back together just as it got dark and Marilyn took off to get the last of the field lapped up…and it worked like a charm. We got the General almost full with what was left on the field and now it will have to sit until Tuesday because everything is closed up for the long weekend.

We have one more field to do, but the move is probably 20 miles, so that will take some time to get things moved. The good news is it will be that much closer to our move north when we are done. The bad news is there won’t be any place to dump the grain with everything closed, so it will not be a big acre day…we will have to bring the Freightliner out of the mothballs for extra room.

Once we got finished and back to the camper, we watched the weather channel as the storms started popping up. Nothing here at the camper, but it looked like we might have gotten some out at the combine, which is okay now that the field is done.

And they really could use the rain…