Tuesday the baling was finished on my second hay cut. The baling was finished - I wasn't the person who finished it. Things had kept going downhill. I was on a highway to Hell.
I had started baling the hay around 2 pm last Thursday afternoon. If things had gone well I would have completed the baling on Thursday. I had a problem with the first bale. The baler should have net-wrapped the bale, but it didn't. Instead the STOP indicator on the baler console flashed. I checked. No, not net-wrapped. I hit the manual net-wrap button. No net-wrap. The STOP indicator kept flashing. Finally I figured out the problem. After all these years of using the baler, this time when I turned the baler on, I moved the button to the 'twine' symbol and not the 'net-wrap' symbol. This is the first time I ever done this. Maybe it was due to my recent lack of sleep.
I set the button to the 'net-wrap' symbol and pushed the manual net-wrap button. The baler spun the bale and then the console said the bale was net-wrapped. I checked and looked through the belts. It seemed like the bale was net-wrapped. I didn't trust it. I pushed the manual net-wrap button again. Then after the baler was done I dumped the bale from the baler. The bale was only partially net-wrapped. As the bale rolled out of the baler the bale partially unrolled. I then had to push and push the bale to completely unroll it. Then I'll have the baler go over the hay again to make it into a bale to be net-wrapped.
First I had to bale the rest of the windrow as trying to turn around back to the unrolled hay would have messed up other windrows. A few minutes into making the next bale from the windrow, the baler started slow down to lock up. I looked at the baler. One of the belts twisted around. How did that happen? How could that happen?
I had to dump the small partial bale from the baler. Then I worked at twisting the belt back to the normal way. I worked and worked and could not twist the belt back. The space around this roller was too small to twist the belt.
Maybe if two people tried to twist the belt they could twist it. I asked my neighbor Curtis for help. We worked and worked on twisting the belt but could not twist it back to normal. We then thought about unlacing the belt so we could pull part of the belt up through the twist out of the rollers. Oh.. but wait a minute. Where the lacing was located was at one of the few points in the baler where one could not reach to pull the lacing pin out. And due to the twist I could not move the belts around the baler. So we went back trying to untwist the belt by hand. As part of our actions I tried to have the baler at times move the belts around. Maybe our untwisting and the attempt of the baler to move the belts would work and the belt would untwist. But no. But after a while I saw the belts had moved a few feet, and now the lacing was where we could work on it to pull the lacing pin.
I was holding the lacing while Curtis worked at trying to remove the pin. I saw the lacing was not flat so by hand I tried to flatten it. Guess what? I somehow broke the pin in two. How? Who knows. The pin has to be strong special steel in order to hold the laces together. And by hand I broke it?!
I then looked over and saw my irrigation had stopped. While Curtis continued to remove the now two pieces of pin I went and restarted the irrigation pump. When I returned he had the broken pieces of pin out and had pulled part of the belt out and untwisted it. It took both of us - me on high and he on low - to rethread the belt around the rollers and rods.
Then I had to go to John Deere and buy a new pin for lacing these style of belts. That meant driving 12 miles to the other side of town during rush hour as it was now 4:30 pm. Fortunately the highway was 4 lanes when I had to pass a truck towing a large mobile home house. Who tows a large mobile home during rush hour?!
I bought 4 pins. I never had to replace any in the past, but it is better to have some extra pins if something like this happens again during the weekend, or after hours.
Curtis and I put the pin in the lacing and fixed the problem. Now I was back to baling my hay. I may not get it all done now on Thursday, but I should get a lot of it done.
But then things got worse. Who would have thought. But that description is for another day as it is complex and I'm still trying to catch up on my sleep.
I forgot to take a picture of the twisted belt, but here is a picture of the lacing before Curtis and I put the pin back into the lacing.
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