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.