June 22, 2013

View of the day-The MacDon guys make another trip out to the combine to work their magic.

We had high hopes of getting done early today, but we might have known nothing ever goes as planned.  We both had to leave at the same time, but were cranked up and ready to cut before 10:30am.  Al had a load to take in to Carmen, while Marilyn started on a load for seed wheat. It was another hot, windy day…really windy…so windy that the straw piled up so thick on the outside of the radiator cover, that it stopped the sweeper arm that is supposed to keep it clear.  Then the alarms started, but once Al brought the General over and we hooked the air hose up to it and blew out the rad on the combine…we were back on track.

There seemed to be an issue with the knife on the header, it was really slow to engage and the feeder would stop randomly…or so Marilyn thought. When Al got back out to the field with the tractor and cart, he checked things over…the belt was tight and everything else seemed in order. Time to call in the pros.  We were only 15 miles from Fairview, where the support van was, so the guys were out in under 30 minutes. Now that’s service!

The guys looked things over, then hooked up some hoses to see what the pressure was like to the header.   Marilyn started the combine and got the feeder running, it ran for a bit, then stalled out and after checking a bit more, we discovered a bearing had gone out of the tightener pulley and it was just sitting on the belt.  One of the MacDon guys had worked with CaseIH for several years, so he was a great help. We didn’t need the MacDon support, we needed the ProHarvest support.

The MacDon guys left and so did we, after getting the arm off that the pulley needed to be pressed on to.  We drove into Fairview and the shop told us it would take about an hour to get the part pressed in, since they were so busy.  We had time to kill, so we went to Sonic for a malt…what’s new?

After getting the part and heading back to the field, we managed to remember how to get it back together and Marilyn was up and running again…we only lost three hours.  No chance to get everything moved back today…but we were still able to get done before the sun went down.

While Marilyn was finishing up the last part of the field, she saw this desk sitting in the pasture and thought…now there’s an office with a view!

After getting the header loaded on to the high speed transport trailer, Marilyn started back for the camper with it and Al took the General in to unload the last load of Oklahoma wheat this year.  Marilyn got back to the camper, got the header cleaned off, and waited for Al to get back before finishing up some bookwork.

And yet another beautiful Oklahoma sunset…