Worry Wart (I Got That from My Mother)

      Why worry?  I’ll tell you why.  The things you worry about never happen—well almost never.  Some things I forgot to worry about:

     Standing between Cousin Jon and Clear Creek when he was splashing big rocks.  One of his launches struck me a glancing blow, leaving a big knot above my left eye.

     Standing behind Brother John when he was hitting a softball with a bat.  That one left me with a permanent scar above my left eye.  Mother patched it up with adhesive tape.  She was as good as a plastic surgeon—the scar now pretty much hides away in a wrinkle.

     That pole climber’s safety belt, given to us by wonderful old Uncle O, would hit me in the mouth with the buckle.  It was a double belt made of thick leather, one loop to go around the climber’s waist, the other loop to go around the pole.  The buckle connecting the two belts was two clips and a metal hoop about three inches in diameter.

  To the dentist I went.  He ground the sharp edges off and told Dad to bring me back when my football-playing days were done and he would cap it.  The doctor didn’t wait that long.  I’ve had a golden smile since I was sixteen.  Since he had just gotten to Dad for a pretty penny (five of us through the dental chair) the good old doctor only charged Dad a “buck”(the dentist’s word) to grind off the edges and paint the wound in my left front tooth with silver nitrate.

      I forgot to worry that the old skunk black-with-white top ’55 Chevy would bump a rod one week before my wedding.

     When I was learning to fly, I learned to worry that the engine would quit running and I would be forced to land somewhere other than the airport.  In my brief career, it never happened—to me. 

      Of course, once in a while, things that I worried about really did happen. First to mind, various crop-destroying hail storms.  I used to worry about going to the dentist.  As a teacher, I worried about many students who sure enough went awry.

     Well, this week I forgot to worry about my old tractor.  Going into this Spring I thought I was in pretty good shape with the two old John Deere tractors.  The 830 had a rebuilt head installed and the 820 was running nicely.

       So I was out fighting some pretty good sized weeds in the summer fallow, the result of all the May rain.

     The tractor drug down several times, but it was usually because of clover plugging up the machine.  I would stop, clean out he weeds and away we would go.

 

     During one of my many stops to clean out the machine, the 820 started laboring as it sat idling.  When I put it into gear in a desperate attempt to get it out of the field, it couldn’t pull its own weight. When I pulled the throttle to kill the engine, it came to a sudden stop.  A bearing somewhere has seized up.

    Boy, I sure wish I had worried about that one.  That probably means major surgery.  No time for that now, with harvest coming soon.

      The poor old 820 suffered an athlete’s worst nightmare.  It had to be taken off the field, not on a stretcher but with the 830 and a chain.

    Then, the 830 got put into the harness and the plowing went on.  Getting over the summer fallow is taking a long time, what with frequent stops to clean the weeds off of shanks plus the break down.  I still have a few hours to finish.

     Then there is harvest to worry about.  But wait, the things you worry about don’t happen, so better not worry myself out of that.

     Henceforth, I shall do my best Alfred E Newman imitation.  What!  Me worry?   (Good luck with that.)

     

Grain Bin Cleanout

     An old friend let me down this week. 

     The unprecedented wet weather continued to throw normal activity to the winds.  Normally, in the past few years, I would be tilling the summer fallow, stretching garden hose across the yard to water the garden.  Evenings would find me taking a shot at an old tire with a golf ball and a nine iron.

     I have managed to disk the summer fallow once.  It is getting pretty furry again, but will be too wet for another day or two to do anything.  The garden hose remains coiled in winter dormancy.  If anything, the garden has too much moisture.

   The radishes abhorred all the rain.  They bolted from seedling to seed.  Many had no bulb at all when they blossomed.  Those bulbs that did develop were pretty pithy.  I munched through them anyway.  They lacked the bite of a good old desert-grown radish.  Moral:  radishes don’t need much water.

     The peas seemed to suffer from too much water, too, going to town only when things dried out and warmed up.  That runs counter to my experience.  A wet cool April usually means a bountiful pea crop.  I garnered a couple of handfuls of pods and sautéed them.  Okay, I fried them.  They were good.

      The golf “course” has been one-third reclaimed by jungle.  Holes one through six are playable, but seven through nine are hidden in a sea of rank grass.  Mowing could be nearly a full-time job. 

     With the Ford tractor sidelined, the Versatile swather came in handy, but then the hay had to be removed.  Some of it went to a good home, but quite a lot remains.

      There are tomato plants in there somewhere.  They have appreciated the last three days of warmer, drier weather, too.  They will rise above the mulch and respond to the lack of competition from the grass and weeds. 

    The potatoes are under there somewhere, too.  If you believe that potatoes should be planted on St. Patrick’s Day, you will be disappointed to know these spuds went in the first week of June.  They will be a couple of weeks finding their way to the surface.  The sprouts are persistent.  I remember potato sprouts finding their way through the burlap bag when I was a kid.  We bought a hundred pounds of potatoes in the Fall.  By February, the upside of the gunny sack would have a toupee of potato sprouts.  Can you smell them?  I can.

     There remains a job, a hard one, that the recent rains delayed:  Finish the wheat-hauling that was mostly accomplished during a week of warm weather last December.  The yard was so wet I couldn’t get across it with a loaded truck.  When things dried out sufficiently, I went to work.

     The first problem was getting the horizontal auger into the channel.  Turns out, water got into the channel and I was dealing with rotted, sprouted grain.  When I succeeded in getting that auger in place, I couldn’t get the grain slide to open.  It too was obstructed by the rotted grain and sprouts.

     I managed to get it open, but no grain flowed.  Fortunately, I was able to reach the slide opening from inside the bin.  With a tile spade, I probed through the grain to the floor where the opening should be.  The wet grain had dried to a crust over the slide so that when I opened the slide, the crusted grain stayed in place and blocked the flow.  A couple of chops with spade fixed that.  Then the auger objected to moving wet rotted stuff.  But finally it did. The rotted grain disposed of, I was ready to go—I thought.

     I took the old Briggs and Stratton for granted.  It would start right up, always has.  It didn’t.

    Normally, a tug on the starter rope is a strenuous thing, fighting the compression of a nine-horse engine.  This time, there was little resistance as I pulled, and the engine kept rolling after the rope was disengaged.  Oh no.  A valve is stuck open, leaving the engine with no compression.

    I tugged on a few more times thinking I could get the valve to close.  No luck.  I pulled the spark plug out preparing to try a little WD40 to see if I could loosen things up.  After the anointing, I replaced the spark plug.  It wouldn’t tighten.  I pulled it out and looked at the plug again.  Aluminum filled the threads of the plug.  Dang aluminum heads, anyway.  (I said something like that anyway.)

      The head had to come off.  The heavy engine had to be taken to the shop.  It all happened.  The engine came aprt, the head came off.  The stuck valve responded to a tap with the rubber hammer.  A heli coil restored the spark plug threads in the cursed aluminum head.

     The left valve, the clean-looking round thing in the field of black on the engine top, was the hung-up valve.  The reviled aluminum head lies beside the engine, lower left. 

    The day drew to a close with me thinking as long as I had the thing apart I had better clean and adjust the breaker points that provide the spark to the plug.  Usually, you have to remove the flywheel to do that job.  That can be a job.  I went to bed with that job in my mind.

     I awoke with a good idea—consult the owner’s manual, which I did.

 

      Where I found that the flywheel need not be removed, the points are housed in a little box on the outside of the engine.

 

     Clean, adjust, reassemble.  The old bugger took off.  By the time I replaced the engine on the auger, I had had enough.  Besides, the ground was still damp and I feared getting stuck and creating huge ruts in the yard.  A one-day reprieve was granted.

      So the new day dawned and I steeled myself to face the ordeal of getting all things to run and scooping wheat in a hot dusty bin.  I started the Briggs.  It took right off.  I started the Lawson and was getting the grain flow going when the Briggs popped, sputtered and quit.

    Now what?  Some absent-minded individual (a Mr. Hairism for culprit) had neglected to turn the gas on.  The Briggs went through the fuel in the carburetor and died. 

      Well, it all worked out.  I made several trips in and out of the bin (both engines ran out of gas while I was in the bin) and the truck had to be moved.  It took about seven hours, but both trucks are loaded and there remains ten or fifteen bushels to be loaded and the bin cleaned out. 

      “I will think about that tomorrow,” said Scarlet blushingly.

     Moral:  Don’t take an old friend for granted.

Together Again

       The Ford tractor steering gear arrived.  The weather was dry, relatively speaking, and a new chain link in hand for the swather’s reel drive chain, it seemed prudent to knock down the rank grass in the yard while the sun shone. 

    The chain was restored after two attempts, the oil change completed, and the farmyard resembled a hay meadow.  Then it rained.

     Nothing to do but put the Ford back together.  Here was the problem:

 

      At about three o’clock on the gear the teeth are badly worn.  That toothless gear could no longer mesh with the badly-worn drive gear.

 

     The drive gear fits between a right and left sector gears that control the right and left front wheels.  I spent two hours trying to get the three gears meshed and back on the tractor, which I did—several times.  But the arms wouldn’t match up with the tie rods running from the gear arms to the front wheels.

    Finally, the awful truth wormed its way into my mind.  I had reversed right and left gear sectors, in spite of my careful attempt to label the old and new gears.  Sure enough, when I changed sides, the thing went on, matched up with the tie rods, and worked perfectly.

   Here it is with arms in wrong.  Reminds me of a Thanksgiving turkey on a platter.

Here it is being checked out before putting everything back together.  It works!

     I decided it would be a good time to change the spark plugs, which are on the very top of the engine, while I had the hood off. 

     With the hood on, you have to kneel and work under the gas tank with only a couple of inches between spark plug and gas tank.  A one hour job with hood on becomes a five minute job, standing comfortably with the hood off.

     The plan was to load up the empty propane bottle, go to town first thing in the morning, grab the new spark plugs, the filled propane tank, return and finish assembling the Ford.

     I awoke to the pitter-patter on the tin roof and the down spouts gurgling.  So I occupied myself doing some work in the shop.  It was Friday.  The propane folks wouldn’t be open on Saturday.  It finally stopped raining.

      Propane tank loaded and secured, Bella and I started up the freshly-graded and dragged road a little before noon.  A road with an inch and a half of rain newly fallen.  It took ten minutes to go that half mile.

 

    Looks like the road grader will be called back into service.  The trip was successfully completed, the propane tank back in place, the Ford reassembled.

    By Saturday afternoon, it was dry enough to take the Ford out and mow a little.  Then I exchanged the mower for the rake.  

     Next step, get the “G” and Farmhand running, move the hay off the meadow.  Some of the hay will serve as mulch in the garden, where the bloomin’ peas are finally blooming.

June Week One

       Many years ago it came as a gift born by a nephew, a gift from his maternal grandfather.  How it came, why it came I don’t remember, if I ever knew.

     So it was stowed under a tree row, wait, make that a row of Chinese elms, where it was out of the way of the mower and couldn’t raise up like a cobra out of the veldt to bite and kill if not the tractor certainly the mower (several such cobras now exist in the farmyard with the Ford tractor still in the shop, parts for the steering much harder to come by than were the hydraulic parts and the June grass rankly bursting forth and hiding antique treasures which become hazards lying unseen waiting to puncture a tire or wreak havoc with the sidelined mower).

     Faulknerian sentences aside, the “cactus dragger” lay in wait underneath the elms for thirty years.  Last week’s attempt to grade the road left huge clods anchored by grass roots.  It was rough, worse to drive on than before.  My second attempt to smooth things over involved the chisel and the spike-tooth harrows.

    I had used the chisel and harrow to both check the wetness of the soil to see if I could finish disking the summer fallow and to destroy the tracks left by the seismographers.  It worked pretty well.  The chisel loosened up the compacted soil and the harrows did a good job of breaking up the clods. 

     As I returned from that task, it occurred to me that maybe it would break up the clods on the road.  So I let the chisel points down so as to just scratch the surface of the road and up the road I went and back down I came.  The chunks were somewhat diminished, but not gone, not forgotten.

      Something lurked in my mind like the old log with the chains lag-screwed to it beneath the dying elms.  The cactus-dragger!  Why not?

     The nice thing about the mind is that it can do 70,000 jobs which the aging body can’t do.  So, a day later, after the ebbed energy from the chisel-harrow episode was flowing in a new day, I grabbed a chain and backed the 4X4 up to the elm row and hitched the cactus dragger to the 4X4. 

     Our entourage actually went a few yards before one of the lag screws fastening chain to log pulled out of the old wood.  The ultimate answer was #9 wire double wrapped around the log, but on that first attempt, I needed to get a couple of letters to the mailbox, so I didn’t have time to do things right.  We would go a few yards and I would have to stop and replace a lag screw. It took a while, but eventually the round trip was completed.

     The wire fix was performed at my leisure.  Now, every trip to get the mail is also a road-smoothing operation.  The 4X4 and the cactus-dragger have become a pair.

 

      In other news, the summer fallow operation begun on April 30 and interrupted by the monsoon on May 4, finally was completed on Thursday, June 4.  I tried to disk the edges with the little tandem disk, but it was still too wet for that.  The wet dirt would jam between the smaller disks and plug up.

     
With the Ford tractor still laid up, I broke out the swather and went to work on the farmyard grass.  That went pretty well once the rust was worked out of the sickle.  That came to end when the reel-drive chain broke.

     It is a light (as in not heavy) chain and I have nothing like it.  It was Saturday afternoon.  I had trucks out of the shed to get the swather out.  I had clean white clothes dry on the line.  I had drained the oil out of the swather engine.  Tools here and there, and you will never guess what.  It threatened to rain.

    Trucks started and back in the shed, golf cart to garage, clean clothes quickly fetched off the line, tools hurriedly grabbed and stowed, and then it rained.  Too late to get to town to get chain repairs.

      So once again, the farmyard grass gets a rain check.  Oh well, it’s Saturday afternoon, the sun is back out, the Rockies are winning, sit in the sun and watch the rainbow.  Perfect, well it would be without quite so many mosquitoes.

     Much better than dust blowing.  Count your blessings.