I did a lot of
worrying unnecessarily. Not too much
unusual about that. Worrying about what
to do for a grain bin. Should have been the least of my worries.
Will I need help
getting bin ready, setting up auger, etc.?
Needn’t have worried about that.
Wil I be ready when the wheat is ready?
(No, but it didn’t matter.) What’ll
I do if it rains and the weeds starting to grow between the wheat rows get big
and gross? Rain? What rain?
But there was a
flip side. Everything went right for a
change. All the old engines fired up
without too much difficulty.
When I put water in
the combine radiator, it began to leak somewhere. I thought , “Oh, no.” I decided to start it up and move it out into
the sun light where I could see what was going on.
Miraculously,
when I started the engine (I had to prime the electric fuel pump to get the
engine going), the leak stopped. It was
the water pump. Oh yes, I remember. The last time I used it, two years ago, it
leaked all the antifreeze out and I had to use water for coolant.
Maybe the water
pump seal healed itself with a little liquid and some heat. But no, as soon as I shut off the engine, the
water came dribbling out a leak hole in the bottom of the water pump
housing.
Thereafter, a
ritual ensued. Start the engine,
run around, climb the ladder, and dump
two gallons of water into the radiator. As
long as the engine was running, nothing leaked.
Shut the engine off, and two gallons of water would leak out. I could live with that, feeling I would have
the devil’s own time trying to find a water pump or seal for a 50-year-old
combine.
To get
everything ready, I had to use the Ford tractor to extricate the header from
the red barn. The Ford had been running
a bit rough lately. Anticipating that I
would need it to run the grain auger, I took the carburetor off and cleaned it
out by blowing compressed air through all the apertures I could find.
It ran after I
remounted the carburetor. It didn’t want
to start when I was ready to get the header out a few days later. After a few head scratches, I figured I must
have flooded it with too much choke. It
took off and the header on its trailer was soon in position to go onto the
combine. (“Position” meaning the left
trailer wheel has to be in a low spot to allow the combine to raise the header high
enough to clear the trailer tire.)
I was able, with
a minimum of backing and readjusting, to get the header and the combine
together. Both trucks fired right up.
The swather took some patience, but it too started and crawled out of
the way. (I didn’t take my two-year-old grandson’s advice to put the swather in
the building before the combine so I wouldn’t have to start the swather every
year.)
The combine had
a few issues which could have been serious.
The double pulley that controls the ground speed started squealing and clacking,
suggesting a bearing failing. I tried
applying a little oil and it quieted down.
Going through
light wheat at top speed over rough ground was hazardous to the sickle and the
reel. I had to take a link out of
reel-drive chain to keep it from jumping off.
When the reel drive belt jumped off, I spent a few minutes with a
Chinese puzzle, trying to figure out how it went around the four pulleys.
I made two trips
to town with the Dodge truck. The brakes
worked! (Thanks to $300+ of brake
booster repair) No waiting, no
problems. The Genoa terminal has added a
row of big steel bins north of the office, including a new outdoor pit to dump
into. A new scale is in the works but
not yet functional. When the new scale
is functional, a truck driver will weigh the emptied truck, grab the scale
ticket from the machine and be on her way.
I didn’t have to
wait in line. They actually dumped a
semi in the old elevator as I dumped my second load. Too bad they didn’t have all that storage two
years ago when we had some real wheat.
I began
harvesting the afternoon of the fourth, Wednesday, and finished Saturday
afternoon, the seventh. It went pretty fast once I got everything ready and got
to the field.
While it wasn’t a
yield to brag about, it was another victory for the ancient ones, including equipment
and operator.
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