Sheets of water splashed against the north windows. Looking out the west windows, I could see water not just falling, but coming in waves that oscillated up and down as they fell to earth.
I hadn’t seen
anything like that since experiencing the tornado in Limon. I began looking out the windows for a funnel
cloud. I hurried from window to window
where the wind-driven waves attacked mainly the north and east sides of the
house.
No funnel cloud
and the blast lasted less than five minutes.
I checked the north windows for leaks. Water was running through the yard.
I could see the west combine shed doors sticking
out at the bottom, waving in the receding east wind. Uh oh.
We forgot to shut the east doors.
We forgot to pin the bottoms of the west door. We were in for some door repairs. Thankfully, the roof stayed on the shed.
It took an hour or so for me to think of the
auger.
It was Thursday July
20. Early morning showers dictated there
would be no harvesting wheat this day.
We had started harvesting Wednesday, putting nearly a thousand bushels
of wheat in the grain bin. Typical
harvest weather!
We spent time
working on the “off-site” bin, putting the finishing touches to alterations we
had made to unloading access and attempts to plug water leaks around the base
of the bin. We would be ready to move to
the ”off-site” bin when the farm bin got full.
We had relaxed a
little from the pre-harvest hurry, getting ready for ripe wheat. We had let down too much. Failure to shut the east shed doors, to pin
the base of the west doors.
Brother Dave
asked as he left if we shouldn't chain the auger to the bin roof. Nah, not necessary, we thought.
Maybe we should
have chained the auger to the bin roof.
However, Brother John found as he researched ideas for dealing with an
overturned auger on the internet, that one man reported complete destruction of an auger
chained to the bin, which got flopped and whipped around in the wind.
When I finally
thought about the auger, it was nearly dark.
From an upstairs window, I can see the bin top. I trudged upstairs and looked out the
window. There was the bin top all right.
No auger. Ouch!
We took a quick
trip out to the bin. We inspected and
found no damage to under-carriage or auger tube. The tube was straight, with no visible kinks
in it. We wouldn’t know for sure until
we got the tube off the ground and could see what was the underside as it lay
on the ground like a dead, bloated, 2-legged aardvark.
Well, there
would be more to do on Friday than merely wait for the wheat to dry out. It took a couple of hours to get the door back
to some semblance of normalcy, repairing the broken frame, and forcing the door
back into it’s regular pathway.
Then came the
real chore of getting the auger up and checking for damage. We decided it would be better to repair any damage
with the auger on its side rather than up in the air after we uprighted it.
The front-end
loader on the 4010 easily raised the auger tube. Three 50-gallon barrels supported the tube
and the repair process began.
The tube was undamaged. Two frames that supported cables used to
raise the auger to bin height were damaged, both bent and one broken.
By Friday evening,
the frames were straightened to a reasonable semblance of normalcy. Welding the broken piece got stalled because
the welder cables weren’t long enough to reach the vice where the broken piece
was held firmly to the brace. Friday
ended with the construction of a 220-volt extension cord.
Saturday was upright-the-auger
day. The engineers on the project
decided we need two pulling points, one on the north to pull the auger up onto
its two wheels, and one on the south to prevent the auger from crashing down
once gravity took over the process.
The Ford tractor
was nominated to do the north pull. It
was connected with a length of chain and a nylon rope to be sure there was plenty
of distance between the auger and the Ford tractor operator in the event the
auger decided to flop over on its other side to the north.
The old Dodge
pickup got the nod for holding the auger back as it descended for a landing on
its north wheel. Pickup and auger were
connected with the “well rope”, the rope used to lower a man, usually Dad, down
into the 90-foot domestic well when there had to be work done on the well
bottom.
We hooked both
rope and chain to the same wheel so accelerator and brake were at the same
point. The engineers decided a third “hold-back”
point should be used to insure that the upper end of the auger didn’t swing
wildly and slam into the grain bin as it went over center on its way back to
its wheels. There was enough well rope
to tie both auger points to the Dodge.
The actual
uprighting was rather anti-climactic.
The Ford tractor had no trouble pulling the auger up, and when it
started down, the Dodge brakes made the touchdown a soft landing. There was a moment of panic when I thought
the Ford was going to let the auger crash back to the earth on the south, but
everything went according to plan.
The auger was
restored to its place and we were ready to try cutting wheat. A 5:30 sample tested 14% moisture, a little
too wet to bin.
Sunday would find us back to harvesting wheat. The auger worked just fine, thank you.
I have never played the "Farm Game" and have played the Money Game only once. I think I know of a setback or penalty suited for those lifelike games at the hands of Mother Nature. And maybe some neglect on the part of a player?
