August 14, 2017

View of the day-Morning servicing time.

The promise of a great day of combining...sun, heat and wind. We got serviced, fueled and rolling by 10 am. Al combined while Marilyn went back to the camper to get lunch made for the day.

After bringing lunch out and making a few rounds with Al, she decided to take a detour moving the pickup to the next field. Across the road, and in the middle of the already harvested field, sat the grain cart. Well, sort of sat. The huge pin that holds the track mechanism had broken and the cart called it quits after the whole track fell off.

This must have been quite the scare for Alex, who was running the cart. It looks like the track is the only thing holding the cart upright. It will stay there until the winter wheat is finished.

It seemed of the four machines in the field, each one had a turn at parking for a fix of one sort or another. Air conditioning wasn't working on one, mechanical issues on another, plugged chopper on yet another. The kinks were worked out and finally they were all making dust and filling the grain cart.

Al needed a break from combining, so Marilyn took over for a while. He joked that she might need to get retrained. Jinx. She didn't even get to the end of the field when the chopper plugged.

For the next three hours, she was inside the back of the combine pulling wet straw out from behind the chopper. Wet, ropey, solid packed straw. Fortunately, Alex came by with the grain cart and swapped jobs with Al...sort of...he jumped in and started pulling straw, rather than supervise as Al had been doing. Al took Alex's job of cart driving. A nice change for him.

It took three hours of pulling, but we finally succeeded in getting the wads all pulled out and the combine put back together. By this time, it was dark, the straw was getting tougher and Marilyn was gun shy about plugging again. We dumped what was on the combine and shut down with the rest of the crew. By the way, our fleet consists of four CaseIH combines...9230, 8230, 8120 and an 8010.

Rain in the forecast for tonight, but none so far...