June 17, 2013

View of the day-Al was pretty excited when he saw this sign in the Bumper to Bumper in Cherokee.  He’s claiming Marilyn won’t let him buy a ticket…she wonders how he would get it across the border.

We had an inch of rain last night and lots of wind, so today was a fix it kind of day…there were certainly no combines in the field today.  We figured we would start by putting the pickup head on the trailer and strapping it down for the move, then picked up the straight head and worked on getting it in shape to start.

The header had been stored inside all winter, but the knife was rusty, so we sprayed some diesel fuel on it to lube it up a bit.  After latching it on and hooking up the hoses and cables, we started it up to get the knife moving.  Al got Marilyn to move the reels ahead and back, but they wouldn’t move…and there was hydraulic oil spraying all over the side of the header.  Time to do some repairs.

We discovered that one of the hoses had blown a hole in it so we needed to take it to town to get a new end put on.  We also needed to come up with a way to hold the reel end while we worked on the hose, so we brought the tractor over to use as an anchor and put a ratchet strap around the reel tube and back to the tractor axle.  This hose was a long one that had to thread through the main pipe on the back of the header, so we tied a wire to the end of the hose so it would be easy to re thread it when we got it fixed.

We went in to Bumper to Bumper and the man there had us a new end on the hose in less than 5 minutes and we were on our way back out to the farm to put everything back together.  If we could remember how.  Fortunately, Marilyn had taken a picture, so we had something for guidance. After assembly, we gave it a whirl and it worked like a charm. Now the wheat has to dry up a bit so we can start using it.

Al did some servicing and Marilyn was on a mission to get the new dish mounted.  She had a plan in mind and went to the lumber yard to get a piece of plywood for the base, then went found a wheeler that seemed to be exactly what she needed to mount the whole works on to make it easily moved for storage.  After getting the holes drilled and the apparatus mounted, she started testing it out, but gave up when the flies got to be too much. It was getting dark anyway.

Al was tied up with a hockey game on TV…which didn’t end the way he wanted.  He is hoping the Chicago Blackhawks win the Cup, but with tonight’s loss they are down 2-1 in the series.

Slight chance of rain tonight…