Welcome to the Spring Mudfest on NadaFarm.. .
I know it doesn't do any good to complain about the weather in Ohio, or anywhere else for that matter. It is what it is, and probably a good thing mankind has no say in what happens, we have proven to be "oh so wise" in choices made in other areas, NOT! So it's Spring, and the snow melts, and the little creeks fill, and it rains, and the little rivers fill, and it continues to rain, and the flooding begins, and I'm sooo happy I live on a hilltop. The weather warms for a day or two, and the neighbor hustles to take advantage of it. That monster 4 wheel drive tractor of his and the mostly green tank of "make it grow like crazy" that the cows provide all winter, make their first appearance of the season, along with that wonderful "smell of money" as it's so elegantly put, in areas of actual farming... Even that monster on heavily cleated rubber doughnuts is slipping and sliding around, it's obviously an art form, a mud and crud ballet, trying to get the heavy tank of effluent to the top of the hills so it can spread evenly around the fields. And to compound the situation, it is a requirement that the new "covering" be "knifed in" asap. Because if it is allowed to lie on the surface as the next rain occurs, it washes away and does no good for the field, and in fact, becomes a hazard to the little streams that feed from the field, into the local waterways. Both wasteful and damaging to the local environment. So it's a ballet in two parts, spreading and plowing it under. And all on the rolling hillsides covered with a thick layer of slippery red clay mud.
In this picture, the dark line above the tractor, is where the tractor slipped and danced and nearly got stuck, trying to get the tank to where it could be used to deliver the winter's supply of "free fertilizer" to the field. It worked pretty well going down hill. And it is as much a sign of spring as a robin, at least around here.
The critters are doing well, though the goat is getting a little more aggressive, pushing and butting, and he has to be the one on top, of the hay bale, the pile of dirt, the boxes in his stall. Gotta be on top. Still pretty good on the daily walks, stays fairly close, and explores the area, anywhere I am willing to stand for a while. I have been tying him out. For short periods. I want him to get used to being out and around on his own, because he is a terror in the garage, and that is where I tend to live. He has to bump, nudge, sniff, and nibble, everything that he gets near, and I'm sure he is going to eat something bad for him before it is all done. So until I can get an appropriate fence I am staking him out in the fields, where I can keep an eye on him. The second day I had him staked out in the front yard of the house, next to the garage, and wearing a nice leather collar that I had on him all winter, attached to a 30 foot cable and a 15 foot chain, and a large screw stake that could be twisted into the ground, only about half way due to the rocks that are everywhere, and left him to eat what he could find in the area. He didn't much care for it, in fact he spent quite a bit of time chewing on the cable and jerking at the end of his run. And I call it a run, because ultimately, that's just what he did. The combined length of all the cable and chain allowed him to get up enough of a head of steam, that when he ran as fast as he could, and jumped off the bank near the garage, he broke the nice collar. He pulled the shiny brass "D ring" right through the leather of the collar, and came to show me what a good job he had done.... So I guess that was a little too much run for him to have control of . And I guess he shouldn't have things he can jump off of, because if it hadn't broken, he could have been hanging there for a while. Well, held upright, if not hanging. And a collar guaranteed for a 150 pound dog, is a joke to a 90 pound goat. Oh, and the "screw stake", took both hands, and the vice, to straighten out. I'm really surprised he didn't break his silly neck, but, they are designed to bang heads with each other so... Now he has a chain collar, and a shorter run, and the stake only goes where it can be screwed completely into the ground, still having a tough time with that.
Meanwhile a couple projects for the neighbors, first a bolt broke off in a power steering unit on a medium size tractor, so it showed up in the garage and after only three days I had it fixed. It would have gone easier if it hadn't been metric, I ASSUMMED I had the right tap and it would be easy to tap it out, I was wrong! And to top it off, it was a hardened bolt (shoulda known) So it was just simple, labor intensive, hand grinding, "spit spit" yuck I hate grinding dust. But on that note, I did receive a little present! Russ likes to see what the biggest thing is he can move on a car trailer, or at least how much he can load and go, so he talked the factory he is currently working for into giving him a 1950's era surface grinder. I guess he was checking on a job in the office when someone said, "Have the 'crane company' toss that old surface grinder in the dumpster while they have that big loader here." So he asked about it, and "I'm guessing" as a joke they told him he could have it. Of course th
ey told him it weighed 10,000 pounds, but if he "thought his car trailer would hold it," he could have it. I went with him to load it, (it actually weighs only a little over 4000 pounds) and it is a nice old machine, seems to be fully functional, with one little issue. It's wired for 440volts. It appears to have the option of being wired for 220, but I have no idea what to do about it, yet, but I will find someone who knows about it, and get it running. Last week Russ showed up with the "mechanical manual" for it. Too Cool! The guys who came out and "smiled" (probably in hysterics internally) at us when we went to load it, seem to be taking it a little more seriously. Even offered some spare grinding wheels, if they aren't useful for any of their other machines .Here it is in a shroud of secrecy on the bobcat trailer my brother lent us. Russ's trailer was loaded with something else at the time, and this load had a due date, do it now or forget it!
Of course I didn't really have a good place for it when it arrived, it was sort of sudden. So it ended up, just inside the door. Of course to get it in, I had to take a little guard off the top of the grinder, and hold the garage door all the way up, but it fit! Basically we just chained it to the post in the center of the garage and winched it off the trailer it came on, which was my brother's father in law's bobcat tractor trailer. Because Russ's trailer was already full of another load of giant steel shelving units, used to store incredibly heavy stamping dies for the presses where the grinder came from.
The picture on the left shows the Surface Grinder, in the garage. The picture on the right shows the purpose, of the machine. The gray wheel spins and the material you want to grind extremely flat and true, hopefully it is a ferrous material, because the machine holds it in place with a magnetic table, is passed repeatedly back and forth beneath it, as the table moves in, or out, by small increments. It is a slow process , but it is exact. One reason this is a great machine, it is big enough, to be stable throughout the entire process. After we got it in the garage and visited for a while russ and Roy went back home and I moved the machine over against the wall you see behind it. If you go in the garage now, you probably wouldn't even notice it's being there, which is good and bad... You might notice the yellow square on the grey hulk, in the far right corner of this picture of the current status of the garage, that's the 2 ton grinder. 
It seems every time I get in the mood to move the machines around in the garage, I end up with a hurry up project for somebody, now I realize I am a "breakdown operation", mostly "field rescue" type things, but I do need to get organized. I am sure I have tools in there that I haven't seen for years. So when the last job showed up, I made it a point to "move the milling machine first", then do the job. Of course it isn't that easy to move a machine in a building that is wall to wall machinery and tons of good junk. So it did take a little while "FOUR SOLID DAYS!" I painted walls, rearranged benches and moved ton upon ton of good junk in buckets. I had to rewire a few areas and finally moved the 3 phase inverter to a safe place under the bench, I have always worried the spinning parts would catch some pile of junk and "rub" a fire into existence before I noticed, because I seldom smell anything and dust and smoke are usually being produced by some part of what I'm doing anyway. So now it is safe. And the wiring for the 3 phase machines is all on the west wall and the lights are really nice now that they are reflecting off the white walls. I hope to have it, so I can isolate the southwest corner enough to make a dehumidifier worthwhile. That would make it less necessary to keep wiping rust off everything, which really gets annoying at times. It does look a little cluttered at times but that is just an impression not the real state of things,...... dream on you crazy diamond......
Back to the new project, it turns out, the harvesting machine has a cutter at it's front edge, a sickle mower, 18 feet long. And it has 37 metal fingered plates that hold the reciprocating blade in place and these 37 plates get worn and broken by cutting in the dirt to chop the hay corn or wheat or beans or whatever the field is filled with, down, so it can be ingested into the machine and separated into the valuable, and waste parts. These fingered plates are available from a number of different sources, and have a variety of forms, including different methods of attachment, and varied manufacturing processes they are produced by. The best ones are from Germany, high quality precision castings, with an anodized type coating, very nice. Problem? $21.00 each. The version carried by the local vendor, are from India have two finished surfaces and are powder coated cost $6.00 each. Problem? They don't fit as delivered. But it isn't obvious, what the problem is, without something to compare them to. Hence the one german unit, which it took me three days to figure out. That was poorly stated. the German unit is beautiful, the India unit is shiny. But the India unit requires changing all the bolts and nuts that hold the parts on, That's 74 nut bolt and washer units, while holding parts top and bottom. The first time it was done, the blade was totally unmovable, even before the finger units were tightened down. That is how I got involved. The trouble with such issues is, I don't usually understand "the question" at the beginning. I have to "see" what is involved, how it is supposed to work, and figure out what was changed, and why it made a "bad difference" and then what we can do to make it work again. So far I have been able to do this, and so far it has been more economical. But this time, it took a while, and I really had to struggle with the process, but after you see the "fix," you will probably understand.
This picture shows the two finger units side by side, the near one is shiny, it is the cheap version. The unit in the rear is very well finished and precise in its design and manufacture.
This picture shows the difference in the square holes, the German unit has a double square that fit over a special nut that allowed a precise height adjustment , pretty handy when you are aligning 37 sets of fingers to a moving blade unit.... Sort of missing on the "crafted in India" version, no adjustment allowed for. I will be very interested to see what the longevity of the castings is like. I suspect they are softer, so they may not break, but I think they may bend into the way of the cutters too easily. I'm hoping this doesn't turn out to be a case of false savings. Which it probably would have been if I charged for the set up, and a comparable hourly rate for my time. But, as I do this stuff as a challenge, and recreation, well, let's just say I save the local fellows some dough...
This is the German unit snugging around the corner of the carrier bar that the replaceable blades are mounted on, it slips side to side and cuts whatever is in between the fingers. The finish is baked into the material, and though it will eventually wear and rust, it will take some time as the surface is already oxidized by a chemical process. These are GOOD features of this part.
This shows the total lack of any form of capture of the cutter bar provided by the India version. In fact the tiny bit of capture was provided by a "cut" I took across the unit before taking this picture. Before the cut, the finger unit captured the cutter bar so hard it couldn't move. Now one little point of capture, is no big deal, but thirty seven of them, randomly spaced across the bar, held it completely immobile. And the shiny surface finish, is powder coating, which anyone with an 80's "and later", Ford knows, just holds the oxidation in, so the parts can rust away and not be noticed until a total failure occurs, like the oil pan, or the frame, of every car and truck they manufactured, during this time frame.. Planned obsolescence, or structural failure, either sells more cars and trucks.. But that's another page altogether.
So I had to take a little break and head over to Columbus for a couple days, something about meeting a new friend of my daughters, she sure likes them young! Again another page.
I was gone while the boys put everything together but the report was, after they were snugged up, the cutter blade, moved "OK". So, we will see what happens during harvest season, when the assembly gets put to the test.
The Dumb Animals! As this is NaDaFarm of course the dumb animals figure into very little of what happens here, I already explained about Oscar the collar tester, but the unnamed cats, have had adventures as well. When we got them, they were supposed to both be males. The white was obviously male, the black wasn't, and the white spent a couple weeks chasing the other in a very non brotherly way. Well, then the black cat got swollen and broke into little mewling pieces, four survived so far. They are identical at this point, at least in their markings, and living in a large wooden box in Oscars stall. They look very similar to the mother, black and white, haven't seen eyes yet, which due to the father might be blue? And don't see momma taking much care of them, but then, I don't spend that much time watching the cats. I'm doing a "machinery trick..." whatever happened to Harry Anderson anyway? So here some of Chris's pictures and a little story about a neighbor kid...
Funny thing happened yesterday: A little girl from up the road stopped by to ask if I'd seen her cat. "Just a minute...I have a picture of her here..." as she opened her electronic something-or-other and started scrolling. "Oh! Here she is!" I glanced at the photo and asked her to wait just a minute, there was something I wanted her to see.
I retrieved my camera, scrolled a bit, and voila! Same cat! The one we picked out from a friend's litter, the one who'd occasionally disappear for a day or so. I reassured her that the cat was okay and she could assume that if it wasn't at her house, it was in our barn. She smiled and skipped her way home...
In reporting this incident on facebook, a friend, mentioned the demise of his" farm cat" due to poor judgment in relation to the speed of a passing semi-truck , to which Chris answered.
In general, our cats don't like machinery or fast-moving objects, so I think we're ok on the races aspect. Although, now we're wondering if the "old" cat that came with the farm died, or just relocated...
Sometimes I just think funny things other times I say them, usually I am better off just keeping them to myself, case in point... I finally got a snowblower for the Gravely Tractor and mentioned what a truly capable kitten tosser it was. And the other day I went into the stall where it is currently stored, and there in the rotary fan portion of the blower, were all four kittens, huddled together. I don't carry a camera, like some people, so I couldn't get a picture of it by the time i whoofed it up to the house got the camera and got back to the stall they had gone else where. But there it was, and even now, they tend to congregate under the mower deck ,of another Gravely I bought on eBay for parts.... Guess I'll have to be careful when I start any of the tractors for a while... It's always something....
The Chores, Fresh Air, Green Acres is for ME.
ray...
The happy Nada Farmer, goats, cats, what the heck? Add the flower garden, and I have nothing but maintenance and not a thing to eat, I guess I could eat the goat, but where's the bread and milk and vegetables? I'm doing something wrong here, I'm gonna halfta get busy on some food items, maybe it's time to start on the green house. I can't even keep up with the mowing, darn rain. Wait for a month, and see if everyone isn't sorry they complained about all the rain... We'll see, we'll see....
Keep coming back, page 49 follows......soon.
