“Don’t sweat the small stuff.”
Or is it, “I can handle the big
things. It’s the little ones that get
me”?
This saga actually began over a year ago
when I bought Neighborly’s 1995 New Holland combine at the auction where the
family disposed of many of his possessions, including an impressive gun
collection. The combine hadn’t been used
for a few years, but it had been inside all that time.
I thought it should have a few good
seasons left in it. My $10,000 bid won
the prize. A week or so later, a June
hailstorm destroyed the growing wheat’s ability to produce seed. It produced heads, but no seed. My 2021 harvest was over before it started.
Neighborly’s heirs kindly shedded the
combine for a year. When I finally
finished planting millet during the first week of July this year, I retrieved
the big yellow machine. Jim had the
header in the yard minutes after I parked the combine proper.
I turned to getting trucks ready. One of the tires on the big Dodge truck
hissed at me when I tried to pressure it up to match its peers. The truck still has split rim tires, and Hugo
is one of the few places that will still work on split rims. Of course it was Friday afternoon, and I
couldn’t pick up the tire until the next Wednesday.
Eventually, I did get the header and the
threshing machine reunited. I had (still
have) quite a few things to learn. When
I put the separator in gear, the reel wouldn’t run. By the time I figured out that I had failed
to connect a hydraulic hose properly, I had burned a belt in two.
Hydraulics are not my strong suit. Whenever I deal with hydraulic connections, I
end up feeling like the greased pig at the county fair. The thought frequently crosses my mind during
the process: couldn’t this be done with
compressed air instead of oil?
I had to “crack” a line (loosen a
threaded connection a little) to release enough pressure to make the connection
properly. I would have to wait until the
next day to try running it again since the burned out belt lay on the ground
mutely accusing me of incompetence. A
trip to the parts store would bail me out, but of course it was past 5 in the
afternoon.
The reel problem successfully solved, I
had to deal with another real problem.
Somewhat reminiscent of the small globule of rubber in the fuel pump
inlet the shut down the Allis tractor, this small item was a sheer bolt, smaller
than ¼ inch in diameter and about two inches long.
Everything was running except the auger
bringing clean grain into the grain tank.
I couldn’t find a replacement sheer bolt on a Saturday morning, so I bought a 6-millimeter bolt, slightly smaller than a ¼
inch bolt, but still too big to fit. I
ground it down enough to go into the holes that connect sprocket and cog that
turned the shaft that turn the gears that propel the auger shaft.
The auger ran for maybe a minute before
with a crunch, a hammering, and a thump,
it quit.
The jury-rigged sheer bolt had sheered.
Something had to be in the auger tube obstructing things. If there was, I couldn’t find it.
Another try or two had the same
result. In the meantime, I had contacted
three folks to see if they might be interested in cutting the wheat, since I
wasn’t getting anywhere. Two were
neighbors and the third a custom cutter.
They all three were smarter than I
am. They didn’t want to have anything to
do with cutting the thin crop with lots of weeds. The custom cutter said I had to get the
combine running. He found a cotter pin
the right size and used it for a sheer bolt.
That didn’t end with us living happily ever after.
The cotter pin went a few revolutions and
then a clunk and the cotter pin’s role as a sheer bolt came to an abrupt
end. I had to find what was jamming that
auger.
Along came John. I had called to see if he might want to do a
little custom-cutting. He didn’t. But he was curious. He went right to the gear box that transfers
power from sprocket, sheer bolt, and cog through a system of five gears, to the
auger.
It became apparent that we were going to
have to remove a lot of stuff, including the “tailings” elevator, to work on
the stuff inside the gear box. John dove
right in. In about three hours, we had
yellow metal lying all about, and a pile of grease.
We also had a few bearing rollers spread
around in the gob of grease that was in the gear box. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to tell us the
rollers from a failed bearing were getting into the gears and causing all the
trouble.
John set about pulling gears off, after he
removed a pound or two of grease. That’s
when I began to get nervous. I have
known friends to tear something apart and find it convenient to be gone when it
came time to put it back together.
With gears out of the way, we could see on
the end of the auger shaft where there should have been a bearing, only an
inner bearing race remained. We had to
get up into the grain bin to pull the auger out.
About this time, the custom cutter
returned. He wanted to take some
pictures of some of the old junk in the farmyard. He had to see what we were doing. He asked if we were having fun and suggested
we might want to replace the other four bearings in the box to avoid having to
do it all again.
We concurred and John set about removing
snap rings and shafts. Our day ended
when the gear box was empty and all the gears and shafts and bearings were soaking in greasy solvent or
perched on rags. I was reminded of James
Herriot’s description of replacing a cow’s prolapsed uterus: would we ever get all that stuff crammed back
in there?
The next day I spent cleaning bearings so
I could get numbers off of them and cleaning and checking gears. I called the parts store and they had three
of the five bearings. The other two
would be available in the morning.
The next day, I ended up making two trips to town to get all the
right parts. About halfway home on the
second trip, the old Chrysler got hot and I had to stop. Fortunately for me, the other neighbor I had
visited with about cutting wheat called me just as I shut down, unfortunately
for him. He ended up towing me home.
Where would I be without neighbors?
Also fortunately for me, John came
back. He couldn’t be there until 5 and
we worked until 8 when I was out of gas.
We had the gear box mostly back together.
So John made a third trip the next morning
and in a couple of hours, we had everything back together and running correctly. John also made a ”chain run” and tightened up
all the roller chains he could find on the machine.
I tried to pay John something, but he
would have nothing to do with that. He
was in his truck and out of the yard before I could do much more than say thank
you.
I headed for the field for my maiden
voyage with my “new” combine. I went a
hundred yards or so and stopped to check on things. The new bearings hadn’t really been tested
because when I crawled up and looked, there was no wheat in the bin.
I began looking around and under the
combine to find the gigantic hole that was letting all the wheat out. Nothing.
I
scratched around in the stubble behind the combine to see if I was throwing
grain out the back. Nothing.
I knew I was cutting stuff because there
was a few straws and some weeds that obviously had been ground up. I could see a few stalks of stubble. Mighty few.
And there were quite a few wheat stalks lying flat on the ground,
impossible to pick up with any sort of machine.
Sawfly, the experts say. Apparently,
they attack the wheat straw at near the ground level.
Nothing to do but try to find “greener
pastures”, or in this case, a heavier stand of wheat. I spent an hour going around the field. A few checks proved I didn’t have any leaks
in the machine, and only a small amount, mostly shriveled, lightweight kernels,
were going out the back end. There were
a few bushels of weedy grain in the grain bin.
I left Field 6, southeast of the yard,
and headed for Field 11, northwest of the yard. I pecked around on the north for an hour,
cutting where it was mostly wheat and not so many weeds. The best wheat was just north of the farmyard
in the lee of the trees north of the farmyard.
After another hour cutting here and
there, getting what looked like the best wheat, I unloaded onto the old GMC,
maybe 50 bushels, I thought. I was done
for that day.
The next afternoon, I set out again to
cherry pick in Field 6. After another
hour, I was done there, too. The A-C
wasn’t working very well and it was hot in the cab.
I
dumped the dab of wheat onto the GMC and headed for town. Where I weighed in with 38 bushels of wheat.
Here endeth the saga of the 2022 harvest,
the harvest that really wasn’t.
